For Suzanne Poirier "Several years ago—more than I care to remember—I approached Professor Poirier about starting a literary journal based on the experiences of medical education and practice. She guided me as I came up with the concept and the name of "Body Electric," and was invaluable in gaining administrative and creative assistance for the first three issues. Then I graduated. Time to play doctor, and Body Electric receded in my priorities. Amazingly, this journal has continued, stronger than ever. I have to thank Professor Poirier for continuing the journal, and for serving as a mentor to every editor since 1985. Thank you, Suzanne, for all your dedication and consideration. You've taken my simple idea and created a proud tradition for the entire UIC College of Medicine community." —Bonnie Salomon, M.D.

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EDITORIAL STAFF

Rich Martinoff, Class of 1999
Victoria Brkovich, Class of 2001
Schuyler Henderson, Class of 2001
Glen Aduana, Class of 2002
John Collins, Class of 2002
Katy Hsiao, Class of 2002

Faculty Advisor
Suzanne Poirier, Ph.D.

Copy Editors
Melissa Jeanne Anderson
Tristan D. Tamplin

Web Site Development
Tristan D. Tamplin

Copyright ©1999 by The Department of Medical Education, University of Illinois College of Medicine—Chicago.

Copies may be obtained from Suzanne Poirier, Department of Medical Education (M/C 591), University of Illinois—Chicago, 808 S. Wood St., Chicago, IL 60612-7309; or call (312) 996-6738.

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EDITORS' NOTE

Over the past fifteen years, more than 200 hundred medical students have shared their anxieties, angers, thrills and doubts as they have explored in poetry their experiences during the lengthy, arduous transition from layperson to physician. During this liminal period of awkwardly fitting short white coats, Body Electric has allowed students to examine their new adopted identity. From orientation week introductory lectures and white coat ceremonies to clinical sessions shadowing a (real) doctor, the medical student is taught to emulate various ideals—usually concordant, although occasionally dissonant—about what it is to be a doctor, what it means to wear that long white coat with a stethoscope draped over your shoulders nonchalantly yet signifying both readiness and expertise. Many of the poems reflect the essential dichotomy that comes with the long white coat—that dialectic between a humanistic empathy and scientific detachment—and attempt to reconcile these seemingly conflicting paradigms for the ideal physician.

There is also in these pages a playful approach to a new language. To some extent, this is just the immature juggling on the tongue of novel sounds and the mnemonic rearrangement of words once familiar but now used differently, oddly. On another level, it is the manifestation of an anxiety: poems give students a chance to control the language that is flooding into their lives, a Fort/Da control over this unnerving environment. With Body Electric, students engage the language of medicine with the artifice and power of the poet and writer as way of facing the intimidating, alienating process of medical school.

More than anything else, though, medical school literature is about coming to terms with people suffering. What can be said about witnessing another's descent into pain? Does not the incommensurability of language and pain make a witnessing of that pain more crushing through its haunting unknowness? Grappling with the impossibility of truly empathizing with another's pain, students turn to poetry as a medium where language can suggest this ineffable pain and intimate a powerful compassion for someone else.

For fifteen years, Body Electric has been a chorus of our voices, voices usually meekly quiet or disingenuously, anxiously brash; voices which, when heard by others in the medical field, are usually struggling, mortified by the mere thought of inaccuracy, for an answer. Body Electric is a forum for meaning, where we strive to shape our personal and communal understandings of the ambiguities and ambivalence of the medical experience. For hundreds of medical students, Body Electric is an arena where they can escape the restrictions of knowing so little amongst so much pain and banish the solipsistic existence of being buried in the textbooks so that they might join the difficult, eloquent communication that is the art of medicine.

—Schuyler Henderson, for the editors

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We mailed invitations to all previous contributors over the past fifteen years asking them to compare their current writing to pieces published while they were students. We were delighted to receive responses from several of them and many were kind enough to share their writing since graduating from the College of Medicine. Their "older" pieces are reprinted next to their more current writing, and excerpts from their letters appear at the end of this volume.

We are also very proud to feature invited pieces from several eminent physician-authors: Jack Coulehan, Stephen Bergman, Richard Selzer, Hunter "Patch" Adams, and Paula Tatarunis. They are all examples of fine doctors and talented writers.

Current students who take Dr. Poirier's class and those who submit pieces to Body Electric are continuing the proud tradition of "Literature and Medicine." We are indebted to them for sharing their experiences and feelings with us.

This issue required more funding than usual, much of which was provided by individuals. We are grateful to James Black, Jonathan Citow, Marisela Dominguez, Marla Hartzen, David Kopacz, Daniel Maloney, Robert and Marsha Mrtek, Gene Quirini, Bonnie Salomon, Barbara Sharf, David Staats, Ajay Wasan, and Sarah Woolsey for their financial support.

The Editorial Staff would like to acknowledge the contributions of several people without whom this issue would never have been possible: Tristan Tamplin and Melissa Anderson worked as our copy editors. Drs. Robert Molokie, David Staats, and Janet Wong were our judges this year. Marsha Manheim and Dean Hammett of the Department of Student Affairs, and Dean Sandlow of the Department of Medical Education provided publication support.

And, of course, a standing ovation is in order for Suzanne Poirier, the one constant in the existence of Body Electric, who kept it all going for fifteen years and four "generations" of medical students; smoothly and elegantly, as is her way.

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NOTES ON INVITED CONTRIBUTORS

ALUMNI

Jonathan Citow (Class of '92) is chief resident of Neurosurgery at the University of Chicago. In July, he will begin practicing at Rush North Shore Hospital. He writes that "An Intern's Christmas" was "inspired by a sleep-deprived state, during a hectic holiday season, while on the trauma rotation during my intern year. Needless to say, things have improved."

Marisela Dominguez (Class of '92) has been a prolific contributor to Body Electric both during and after the time she was in medical school. She is currently a Family Medicine Resident at the University of Illinois—Chicago.

Marla Friend Hartzen (Class of '90) is the Psychiatry Clerkship Director of Lutheran General Hospital. Her letter to Body Electric is printed in its entirety on page 40.

David Kopacz (Class of '93) is currently an instructor at the University of Nebraska Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Kopacz writes "My previous poem, "I stare out," is about the experience of medical education from the inside. It was written during the middle of my third year of medical school. What stood out to me then was the emotional and physical strain that I was under and how this interfered with my capacity for empathy. The "mustachioed resident" embodied an uncaring attitude toward both his students and his patients which left me feeling out of place—not quite a doctor, not quite a patient.

The current poem, "I Remember," is written from an outside perspective after finishing my Psychiatry residency. Re-reading the House of God, which accounts for the dedication to Samuel Shem, inspired this poem. These memories are of the daily death and suffering which I did not reflect upon because they were "just part of the work." Each memory is a short tribute to these individuals who have returned to me with a surprising intensity. I look back and wonder why I was not able to write about these experiences at the time they occurred."

Greg Olson (Class of '88) writes that "Lessons" "was written at the very end of the first year studying medicine at UIC. The grisly scenes from anatomy lab were fresh in my mind and heart. Frankly, I felt terrible and burned out. Yet, amid those ashes, there was a sense of hope. There was a sense that the faculty indeed were trying to pass on the torch of health care. And in preparing for clinical medicine, we are all on a journey—the patients too. The last four lines are mysterious to me still. What shrine am I/are you looking for? When does my/our turn end and being again?

Oddly enough, "Something to Drink" was also written during a time of professional transition. It was inspired by a hope for more unity between the healer role and other roles in my life. My father recently had coronary artery bypass surgery, and in the process of his recovery, we all learned something about the importance of simple acts of kindness in health care.

The first draft of this poem was written in Beijing, while preparing for village clinics on the Dalian Peninsula of China. It was a great trip. We provided some Western-style health care and learned about some Eastern health care methods. Without a doubt, working through interpreters did force me to focus. Don't get me wrong. The pathophysiology jargon does have its place. Hey, would you like a glass of hypotonic dihydrogen oxide? How about a glass of water?"

Bonnie Salomon (Class of '87), the first student-editor of Body Electric, is currently an Emergency Room physician at Lutheran General Hospital. She writes: "A little over ten years later, and I'm still working nightshifts, feeling the awkward isolation of working at 4 a.m., while my family and friends sleep. Nightshifts are especially poignant for emergency physicians, but also filled with camaraderie and humor (fortunately, now I am only two nights a month). As a medical student, I sensed immediately the special quality of emergency medicine, of how you are in a tragic-comic world. The unexpected becomes the norm and you teeter on the brink of chaos or the mundane. Ten years of practice and I still sense that "broken world...wanting repair." Of more recent vintage is my perspective of the "rendezvous," of my impact on my patients, and how we intersect each other. The whimsy and weight of medical practice persist through the years, and somehow, my first impressions of emergency medicine seem close to the present."

Ajay Wasan (Class of '94) writes that, for him, "writing poetry has been a way to capture the essence of powerful experiences. Medical school and residency are packed with these, for there are few other professions where one is such a direct witness to profound suffering."

Both of Dr. Wasan's poems are set in the Arizona desert. "There's something about the sparse beauty that put me in a reflective, poetic mood. While none of my poems here are about suffering, I think that is because I have always had a hard time expressing in writing how clinical experiences have effected me on an emotional or psychic level. Yet, writing on other topics has made me feel more in touch with the humanism of doctoring.

Since finishing medical school, I have come to a greater appreciation of other powerful experiences in life, which I have written about, in this new piece. As I have been immersed (and at times drowned!) in the routines of clinical work, I have found other areas of life that move me with the same intensity as medicine once did—and occasionally, still does. Perhaps this is maturity, or perhaps I should have looked around myself more in the first place."

Janet Wong (Class of '96) is a resident in the Department of Dermatology, University of Illinois, and a judge for this year's issue of Body Electric.

PHYSICIAN-AUTHORS

Hunter "Patch" Adams was originally asked by us to write a piece addressing medical students' frustrations with the shortcomings of the established medical system. Although it was a busy time for him, what with the release of the film based on his experiences and his ongoing fundraising for the Gesundheit Institute, Dr. Adams did not disappoint. With the characteristic mixture of utopian idealism and proactive optimism, the doctor who proudly wears the red rubber nose inspires us to make the necessary improvements.

Stephen Bergman (Samuel Shem) is the author of House of God, the classic, beloved account of the hospital intern experience, Mount Misery, and We have to talk: Healing Dialogues between Women and Men (written with his wife, Janet Surrey). He is director of the "Bill W. and Dr. BOB Project" at Harvard Medical School.

Jack Coulehan is a professor of medicine and Preventive Medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His most recent books are The Medical Interview: Mastering Skills in Clinical Practice and Intensive Imaging: 100 Poems by Physicians (co-edited with Angela Bell).

Richard Selzer was for many years a surgeon practicing in New Haven, CT, where he was also on the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine. His books include Letters to a Young Doctor and Raising the Dead. "A Portrait of Two Surgeons" is excerpted from a forthcoming volume of his Diaries.

Paula Tatarunis is a poetess whose work has appeared numerous times in the Journal of the American Medical Association and other journals. Her poems combine an intuitive, playful knowledge of language and powerful analogies with the world of medicine that she knows intimately.

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