HUMANITIES IN MEDICINE
A MOUTHFUL OF HUMMINGBIRDS BY ELAINE GUREGIAN
T
he patients of William Carlos Williams, M.D. (18831963) may not have known that he had another profession besides the family practice he sustained for 40 years in Rutherford, New Jersey. But it seems that Williams didn’t view writing poetry and healing people as an either/ or proposition. And that’s something that the top winners of NEOMED’s 40th annual William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition found tremendously validating. “In med school we think there can be only one path and if you have any other interest, it can detract. This competition reminds me that there are programs like NEOMED that incorporate things like poetry and that it’s ok to have a creative outlet,” said first-place winner Thomas Nguyen at this year’s award ceremony, held in person at NEOMED for the first time since 2019. In his winning poem, “Here, the light is always fading,” Nguyen memorialized his grandmother’s last days, writing, “I remember your voice, a mouthful of hummingbirds, their beaks pointed skyward.” Being brought to campus for the annual poetry event gave three top winners a chance to spend time with likeminded students and faculty. Seeing a home for topics like narrative writing in the NEOMED curriculum, “I’m in awe of all the programming,” said third-place winner Anneka Johnston, a third-year student at Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine.
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MORE A NECESSITY THAN A HOBBY “All three of us write poetry to make sense of the wild and crazy things we experience as medical students. To me, poetry is more a necessity than a hobby,” said second-place winner Amelia Khoo, who — like Nguyen — is a third-year medical student at Texas A&M University College of Medicine. “Coming from a poetry mindset makes me more attentive to details that make me a better physician, too.”
GRAPHIC MEDICINE Keynote speaker M.K. Czerwiec, a pioneer in the field of graphic medicine, told the students in the audience that she discovered while serving as a nurse in an HIV/AIDS unit in Chicago in the 1980s that making comics could help her process her feelings. When she was overwhelmed by the seriousness of the issues she helped patients cope with — and later, when she faced her mother’s cancer — she discovered solace in the pages of a notebook. Filling each piece of paper with simple drawings and captions gave her a place to unload each day’s heavy emotions — and make room for more. Following are the three prize-winning poems from the 2022 competition. As always, the winning poems will be published in the Journal of Medical Humanities. Listen to the winners read their poems and read co-founder Martin Kohn, Ph.D.’s reminiscence about how the contest began, both at neomed.edu/extras.
