A breast cancer specialist and prizewinning Portuguese poet is pioneering the teaching of poetry alongside medicine to help trainee doctors empathise with their patients.

According to an article in the Observer, João Luís Barreto Guimarães believes that poetry can help students connect holistically with their future patients, as opposed to viewing them as a medical problem in need of fixing.

“I get them to look at poems that talk about empathy, compassion, solidarity and other similar humanistic values that doctors should strive for when they are in front of a patient,” he says.

Guimarães has been a practising breast cancer surgeon for three decades. When not in theatre carrying out life-saving operations, he is back home at his desk crafting his own poems. He has 10 published collections, and in 2022 he was awarded Portugal’s Pessoa prize in recognition of his contribution to the arts.

Cutting out words when editing, he reflects, somewhat startlingly, is “a bit like how I eliminate a tumour with my scalpel”.

The structure of the course covers basics like imagery, sound, tone and rhythm. The course reading list includes a number of poet-medics, including Júlio Dinis (a Portuguese surgeon), William Carlos Williams (an American paediatrician), Gottfried Benn (a German pathologist), and Miroslav Holub (a Czech immunologist).

Wendy Cope’s poem ‘Names’ is cited in a module about the depictions of the human body in poetry. The short, single-stanza poem describes the life of a woman christened Eliza Lily, but who, in practice, goes by an assortment of different names – Lil, my darling, Mrs Hand, Nanna. Yet when she finds herself in hospital at the end of her life, alone and without friends, the medical staff know nothing about her bar the clinical contents of her medical file. So, as Cope’s poem concludes: “For those last bewildered weeks / She was Eliza once again.”

The lesson is to remember the person behind the patient, says Guimarães: “These days, doctors often don’t have time to stop and think, so everything quickly gets reduced to the technical and mechanical. What I try to convey to the students is that, as with a poem, each of their patients is unique.”

Guimarães is also a keen advocate of exposing students to the “evils” of excessive sentimentalism”, a habit he urges them to avoid on the wards. He also sees poetry of a more abstract or complex nature as a vehicle for elucidating the capacity of speech to hide as well as reveal.

It is not just poets who seek to disguise their full meaning behind wordplay and literary devices, he argues. For reasons of fear, distrust, or just embarrassment, so do patients. Good doctors, he thinks, know how to “read between the lines”. “In our lessons, we often talk about decoding, because using illusion or symbolism or enigma is something many poets do to get across their message in a hidden way.”

Guimarães’ own poem ‘História Clínica (Clinical History’) ostensibly deals with a woman undergoing a double mastectomy, but beneath the surface lies a darker story about her experience of domestic abuse. The poem toys with the double sense of the Portuguese word medalha, which can mean “medal” (used here as a reference to the woman’s breasts) or, less commonly, “bruising” (linked in the text to the “bad mood of her husband”).