The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

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Notes from a Healer

Morning Poetry

Unhurriedly I drove to work, taking the back way over macadam country roads beneath an overcast sky. A continuing medical education cassette tape played in the console, the speaker’s voice droning on about the evaluation of headache in children. I paid little attention and looked out the window instead.

Up ahead, after the four-way stop, I dropped my speed appreciably, falling behind a wagon laden with lathes of fresh-cut broadleaf tobacco. Men were walking in the dirt along the side of the road, coming in off the fields which only yesterday had boasted a green sea of broadleaf plants. Today the red earth was strewn with only the remnants of stalks here and there.

Off in the distance across the fields I could see empty wagons hitched to tractors, moving slowly down to where more workers labored among the cut tobacco plants. I passed a water barrel mounted on a makeshift frame in the field next to the road. Several men were lined up, waiting for a drink.

Overhead, the sun broke through the clouds, sending dazzling spears of white light down on the wilting green cropped plants lying on the red earth below. Slowly, methodically, the men worked in the hot morning sun. You could see the sweat on their black faces. Several paused to wipe their necks with large red or blue handkerchiefs.

They had been working steadily for the past two days, and already the fields were stripped bare save for the few small stands of tobacco plants left behind to flower for seed.

As the speaker’s voice on the cassette tape droned on, W. H. Auden’s words came to mind, reminding me of the bucolic scene before my eyes—

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along—

I looked up, half expecting to see a boy falling out of the sky, but only the sun’s rays cascaded down onto the landscape. As Auden says: “everything turns away quite leisurely from disaster—”

I saw my chance as we rounded the bend onto the straight road ahead, downshifted and let out the clutch, swinging to the left and swiftly passing the tobacco wagon and the man riding on the blue tractor. He glanced in my direction, then settled his eyes back on the road. “Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot where the dogs go on with their doggy life—”

Fifteen minutes later I pulled into a parking space and let myself into the office through the back door. The boy’s medical chart lay on my desk, undisturbed from where I had left it the night before, with the note that documented my futile attempts to contact his mother by telephone.

I had left a non-descript message with her daughter, the boy’s younger sister, saying I would call again first thing this morning. I dropped my briefcase and picked up the phone. As I dialed the number I could hear laughter coming from the front office. The mother answered on the third ring, and recognized my voice immediately. I cleared my throat and started: “I’m afraid I have some bad news … the MRI shows a tumor inside your son’s head—”

Once again the high-pitched laughter drifted down the hallway.

Editor's Note: The poem mentioned in the piece is Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, which he wrote after viewing Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus (http://www.english.emory.edu/Paintings&Poems/Auden.html).

About the Author

Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatric medicine as a Physician Assistant for the past three decades. As a clinician, he has always gravitated toward the humane aspect in patient care—what he calls the soul of medicine. Over the past decade, Mr. Maurer has explored the illness narrative as a tool to enhance the education of medical students and cultivate an appreciation for the delivery of humane medical care. His first book, Patients Are a Virtue, recently reviewed in The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, is a collection of fifty-seven patient vignettes illustrating what Sir William Osler called “the poetry of the commonplace” in clinical medical practice.

Published: September 27, 2007