Rafael Campo

The Healing Art

A celebrated poet and doctor connects—through favorite verses and stories from his life and practice—poetry and healing.

As a respected and much-loved doctor, Rafael Campo shares favorite poems with patients on his rounds. After all, incantation has played a role in healing for millennia, displaced only recently by modern scientific obsessions.

In this luminous book, Campo restores the link between poetry and healing, in lyrical prose that also offers "pharmaceutical" samples of work by a diverse group of poets such as Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, Miroslav Holub, Audre Lorde, Lucia Perillo, and William Carlos Williams. He leads us through the stages of illness and recuperation, from first inklings of mortality, through symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment, and finally recovery or—and here medicine recoils but poetry perseveres—death, and even immortality. At each stage, Campo reveals the richness of individual poems, and the potent medicine they offer. Finally, he proposes a "biocultural" model of illness as provocative as it is humane—one that restores the art of poetry to its rightful place at the heart of a healthy society.