"The physician as poet" review of: Pereira, Peter Saying the World

Peter Pereira is a family physician and a poet. I weave excerpts from Dr. Pereira's poems into a brief history of medicine's mythological and historical roots, beginning with the Egyptian god Thoth, and the Greek physician Hippocrates. Along the way, I touch on the European Middle Ages and the Islamic World. Finally, I quote poet-critic T.S. Eliot, who was an early influence on Dr. Pereira's decision to become a poet, and contemporary physician-poets Rafael Campo and William Carlos Williams. I end by placing Dr. Pereira, whose practice is oriented toward immigrant families, in his indigenous Pacific Northwest, arguing that being both physician and poet helps Pereira to live in a world that is both intimately human and naturally impersonal. The physician as poet 1. Peter Pereira is a physician who has lived in Seattle, WA. for most of his life. He did his undergraduate work in both Biology and English, before attending the University of Washington Medical School. One of a growing number of doctors who balance the craft of medicine with poetry's intuitive tropes, Pereira begins this first collection with a poem titled "Nosophilia," which means "love of affliction." Why begin here? "How else count, recount what woes?/Pimples that burn. Fevers that shiver./Shinsplint. Bowleg. Backache. Rupture./What pains us makes us us." As the brain processes everything we call us, whether consciously or unconsciously, physical and emotional pain cannot be tweezed apart. One aspect, very palpable to a doctor, is loss. Because this state of emptiness can begin even before birth, Pereira initiates the body of his book with a poem titled "Fetus Papyraceous." Sometimes one of the twins dies in utero, without his mother ever knowing she'd been twice blessed. Hungry for life, the living twin Will absorb his double... The title refers to papyrus, a plant of the sedge family that ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans soaked, pressed, and dried into thin slices of the resilient material on which they preferred to write. In Egyptian hierology, language and medicine were unified in the figure of Ibisheaded Thoth, "the lord of writing," from whom we also received astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, music, and the healing arts. Pereira writes that the unborn child, whom he calls "our paper twin," "remains a faint imprint/ barely visible in the translucent web/of amniotic membranes – a fetal hieroglyph." So it begins here, with loss and recovery, written on "the blank page onto which all/ our imagined lives are written." Published: 17 May 2006 Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2006, 1:8 doi:10.1186/1747-5341-1-8 Received: 08 March 2006 Accepted: 17 May 2006 This article is available from: http://www.peh-med.com/content/1/1/8 © 2006 Weishaus; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.