Rafael Campo Speaks on Empathy

Jamie Rosen Staff Writer

This year's William Starr Freshman Course lecturer Dr. Rafael Campo spoke about the importance of language in his career as a healer. Campo shared some of his poetry with an audience of students and faculty on Sept. 23 in the Villard Room. Campo is a professor at Harvard Medical School and a doctor at Beth Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Campo identified the theme of his lecture as "the connection between poetry and healing, and the way my own trajectory as a writer has helped me be a physician." He recited a sample of his own poetry to show the ways his experiences and medical career have inspired his art.

"I really have found that my engagement with my own writing has enriched my work with my patients tremendously," he said. "I think the importance of language is in helping them to define themselves, which is a very important aspect to healing."

Campo stressed the importance of empathy in a doctor's work. He mentioned that during his education, an evaluator commented that he identified too strongly with patients. "To me, that's just a shocking notion, to train people who will be caring for others who are ill or suffering to not be human," he said.

He remarked that his awareness of language and dialogue help his patients feel more at ease. "I spend most of my time in a place called a hospital, which has something to do with hospitality, although I think we often forget that in medicine," he said.

As an educator, Campo instills empathy in future doctors by encouraging them to express emotions regarding their work. "It turns out that many students are starved for this kind of opportunity," he said.

Campo often slips poems related to illness into packets of information that he gives to newly diagnosed patients. "[It is] a gesture that says, 'I want to know you as a whole person,'" he said. "'I want to know not just the details of your illness... but I also want to know what the truth of this illness is to you.'"

Campo said he worried that he was not a good candidate for medicine because of his Catholic upbringing, lack of Latino role models, and impression that homophobia plagued the medical profession. However, this was not the case. "As it turned out, when I actually got to Harvard Medical School, it was the fact that I was a poet that was a little scary and problematic," he said.

Campo's newest book of essays, The Healing Art: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire, won the Lambda Literary Award for Memoir.