A pulmonary intensive care unit might be the last place you would expect to find poetry. But it is here, every day.

"This is a place where 25 percent of patients die. Most are strangers to us when they arrive. Most suffer greatly," says physician Peter Kussin. "Medical students here see the whole range of human suffering. They immerse themselves in the details of patient care to ward off thoughts about the misery around them. When the suffering does become apparent, they are frequently overwhelmed. The poems help."

Kussin, who is an associate clinical professor of pulmonary medicine at Duke Medical Center, uses daily doses of poetry as part of students' training during their rotation in the ICU. "It's remedial poetry for doctors," he says. Despite their lack of formal instruction in literature, he adds, medical students and nurses are able to use poetry to explore their often-suppressed feelings of grief, sadness, and even guilt about the patients they serve.

Ninety-nine percent of doctors were science majors, Kussin says. "Physicians live in a world of PDAs, pagers, and cell phones. Along with that comes a risk of the loss of a part of the human machinery. I can't turn off my pager. But there is a way out--and it all begins with William Carlos Williams."

Kussin sees the noted physician-poet, who often scribbled lines of poetry on prescription pads as he made his rounds, as the exemplar of the way in which poetry can encourage empathy, bringing a sick patient's individuality and feelings vividly to life. Williams showed that "poetry can counter the pull of professional gravity and help create more soulful physicians," says Kussin. "Why do I read poetry with my students? Because when you get to the core, it's the deepest part of what we do."

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Williams himself saw his two arts as inseparable. "As a writer, I have never felt that medicine interfered with me, but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing that made it possible for me to write. Was I not interested in man? There the thing was right in front of me. I could touch it, smell it. It was myself naked, just as it was, without a lie telling itself to me in its own terms."

Physicians and literary scholars alike are finding that the intersection of medicine and the humanities enriches both disciplines. The field of medical humanities--the interdisciplinary study of medicine, psychology, literature, and history--is a burgeoning area in medical education around the country. Johns Hopkins University publishes the scholarly journal Literature and Medicine. Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons publishes Reflexions, a journal of writing by medical students. And physicians' and medical students' poems and stories are making their way into anthologies, chapbooks, e-zines, small literary magazines, and even venerable journals such as The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Annals of Internal Medicine.

Duke has been linking poetry and medicine for decades. The Health Arts Network began offering poetry workshops for Duke patients and their families as part of a pilot project in 1986. Today, volunteers read poetry to patients, patients keep journals, and hospital employees, medical students, and others gather in the medical library for literary discussions twice a month. On display on the walls of the medical center are fifty poems by poets, classic and contemporary. Among them is one of Kussin's favorites, Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son," with its lines:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor--
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on....