Not long ago, we studied medicine.
We’d look inside another person’s mouth
and see the desolation of the world.

We’ve studied medicine until we cried all night.
Through certain books, a truth unfolds—
anatomy and physiology,
each nameless cell contributing its needs.

[Now,] the doctors make their rounds like satellites.
The ICU is like a dream we think we can decode.
The ventilator’s rise and fall.
We listen, as if the breath sounds might not lessen.
They page us and we go.

A doctor writes an order in the chart.
A doctor writes prescriptions to be filled.
The hospital hums like a consciousness.
The coughing [is] like a symphony
a virus might conduct.
The patient’s history is a poem in the chart.

A doctor writes invisibly upon a patient’s chest,
the stethoscope’s black curl like punctuation.
They say the heart is just a muscle,
or the heart is where the human soul resides.
The body speaks [a] stranger’s language—
breath like poetry, heard almost lovingly.

It takes imagination [to transform
what we thought was] unspeakable.
No knowledge is more powerful
than knowing love,
[to be a] healer…to the feeble,
[to know that] the body speaks,
and what it tries to say
[is] more than this,
is more than what’s recorded in the chart.

[We are] an instrument of hope, of relief.
There is suffering, yes, but there is peace.

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This cento (Latin for patchwork/collage poem) was read by the physician-professors at the UA College of Medicine-Phoenix for their MED Gala 2022. See the video here.

It was composed by Dr. Rosemarie Dombrowski using lines from the following poems by Dr. Rafael Campo, award-winning poet and essayist, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and the editor of the Poetry and Medicine column for JAMA:

Hospital Song
Health
Primary Care
Why Doctors Write
Reforming Healthcare
What the Body Told
What We All Want
Defining Us
The Doctor’s Song
Hospital Writing Workshop