The Naked Physician: Poems About Patients and Doctors by Canadian Physicians

Esther Fisher is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and
a former food critic for The Globe & Mail.

A fitting epigraph for this volume might be Poe’s statement that for
him “poetry [was not] a purpose, but a passion.” The purpose or
vocation of all the contributors to The Naked Physician is the practice
of medicine; their passion is poetry charged with an emotional intensity
that would be inappropriate to physicians in their professional role.

These doctors write about the basics of existence, themes that
routinely touch their lives—birth and death, pain and suffering, joy
and sorrow. They emphasize not so much the physical aspects of disease
and health, but the emotional and spiritual reverberations of dealing
with and coming to terms with crises, both physical and mental.

Charach, a psychiatrist (as are more than a third of the contributors)
divides the book into two sections: “The Lives of Patients” and
“The Lives of Doctors.” Each section moves through the stages of
life.

The first section includes poems about birth, children’s illnesses,
and the rocky road of adolescence (treating, among other things, teenage
suicides and young people seeking advice about birth control). These are
followed by poems about traumas that may be encountered in
maturity—alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, aids, child
abuse, open-heart surgery, carcinoma, old age and senility, and finally
death. The tone is mostly serious, but there are moments of comic relief
and light-hearted irony, as in Shel Krakofsky’s “Twilight
Exchange,” about parents who don’t want to be relegated to nursing
homes: “Our parents should gladly ascend the ramp / And close their
homes without yearning / And see that we are only returning / The love
that sent us to summer camp.”

The second section ostensibly deals with doctors’ lives; there’s a
good deal about the rigors of internship and residency, and about the
drama of life-and-death emergencies, but the overriding theme is
mortality. As with life itself, though, there are brighter
moments—love poems, satirical views of doctors and of doctor/patient
relationships. Among the many moving contributions are those that treat
aging as a normal and not a pathological process. In “Origami,”
Arthur Clark depicts life as a folding: first the newborn with folds of
buttocks, groin, and eyes; then the folds of time as wrinkles and lines
appear; and “Then I begin to see the process, / in long shadows, by
altered evening light, / as a process, and how each folding / brings you
closer to perfection of the finished piece.”

This anthology offers no easy answers, but the verse explores—at
times in light and simple rhyme, at others in highly polished,
well-honed poetry—the mysteries of life.