When I first came to work for Atlantic City Medical Center in 1994, I learned of an annual conference to bring humanities into the training of the Internal Medicine residents. Victor Bressler, MD, who championed these events, called them “Bringing Caregivers Closer.” He was ahead of his time.
This was long before Rita Charon, MD founded the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia. There was not a lot of enthusiasm for these events from the Residency Director at that time. Nor were they well received by many of the residents who saw this conference as a needless interruption of their clinical training. The larger community, though, was impressed and gave these events high marks.
Bringing Caregivers Closer
Many nurses and social workers attended, as did professors from Richard Stockton College (now Stockton University). The community support, along with Victor’s substantial force of will, drove the longevity of the program. My busy schedule didn’t allow me to attend until around 2003.
That year, the event was held at the Carnegie Library, a historic building in Atlantic City which is walking distance from the hospital. I could attend the conference and still make rounds on my patients. The topic for that year’s panel was the experience of illness.
I was particularly struck with two of the presenters, Kelley White, MD, a poet and pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia, and Pam Swallow, a children’s book author and survivor of stage IV metastatic cancer of unknown origin. Survival of this stage of cancer, especially when the primary source is unknown, is virtually impossible.
Panel Presentations
Pam told the story of being fascinated with groundhogs all during her rigorous cancer treatments. They kept showing up for her, in her yard, on her front porch, in her dreams. She researched the Native American symbolism.
She learned that groundhogs represent family and community. This made sense because her family had rallied around her to research both traditional and non-traditional treatments for her cancer. After her recovery, she wrote a book about groundhogs.
Kelley White read some of her poems. The one that still stays with me is the one about the boy with scars on one ankle. Here’s the last line of that poem. “Mama used to keep me chained up in the basement.” There was an audible gasp in the room. Here’s another evocative poem published in the JGIM.
Shadow Professions
In later years, I would be on panels for this event. Once, I had the honor of serving on a panel with Kelley. I got to read one of my favorite Rumi poems, “Two Kinds of Intelligence.” I remember Kelley nodding in recognition and agreement when I spoke of medicine as my “shadow profession.”
In Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, she talks about creatives going into shadow professions, into a safer version of what’s really desired. For instance, an artist will go into art history instead of becoming a painter. I told the audience that, for me, being a physician was a shadow profession for being a healer.
What I didn’t share was how many non-Western, non-traditional modalities I had explored in trying to find my true calling. I finally figured out that being a physician was the shadow for healing through writing. The making of connections is necessary to diagnose, but these connections are a shadow for the deeper connections to be made in poems and in prose.