The doctor is in the stars: a poet-physician sees medicine in the cosmos, and the cosmos in medicine. From the article:

Walt Whitman did his share of medical activity as a volunteer nurse, but medicine was different then. [Fady] Joudah, by nature of his work and interests, has a grasp on our visceral inner workings and the flightier work of the mind — the gristle and the sublime. “Tethered to Stars” pulls together those two spheres. True to its title, Joudah’s collection of poems musically connects the body to the Earth and the Earth to the stars and all of that to the constructs our minds created for those spaces in between. It’s earthy and ethereal, as we are….

Joudah sees the surface level ties there, but also in it a metaphor for science that suggests greater connectivity that perhaps isn’t as obvious.

“We say ‘new age’ mockingly,” he says. “But we’re learning things … the calcium in our bones is the same as the calcium in the cosmos. The way trees in a forest communicate through molecular transmission between fungi and roots. So there are places here I’m trying to imagine further connectivities. Black holes, worm holes, these searches. How we stay connected to one another. Connected to something larger than we are. We start with the Earth and look outside the Earth. Isn’t that what faith is? Or religion? And theology? Regardless (of) one’s view on institutionalized religion, I’m intrigued and chasing that kind of language.”…

“I think being a physician has fortified or enriched me in two ways,” he says. “One, studying medicine is essentially entering the third dimension in the universe of language. What poetry is not about the body? What life is not about the body? The body — bodily desire, body organs, bodily illness, eros, death, the body politic, maps, the celestial body … Everything is body, body, body, body.”

This led to inspiration. “I realized that medicine offers me this third dimension of language. It’s not just about the spleen or kidneys. It’s about the molecular and the celestial. And then, too, there are these eternal tropes about what make human art: grief, joy, pleasure, ecstasy, love, loss,” he says. “You find that practicing medicine. The fear of dying, the joy of living, the compassion of grief and violence of grief and the compassion of healing. All of these things come into it. They allow me to create these poems of different register, some narrative, some short. Some complex, some aphoristic. Medicine has thrown me into that world, and it’s like a mosaic.

“But definitely poetry preceded all that.”

For other posts on health humanities, see here.