Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Betsy Bouldin worked in neurology and sleep medicine and has taught anatomy and physiology. The poem she sent us reminds us that an essential part of a physician's life also includes teaching the upcoming generation. Listen closely to the many lessons she is imparting in her poem "To Tom, My Medical Student: How to Interview a Patient":
Dear Tom --
Answers are just runes that hint at truth.
Divination deepens with lost youth.
Here are some shards I've gathered through the years.
You must begin with fear.
This is not fashionable advice.
Fear may appear in any guise --
avoidance, arrogance, or terror.
Begin, but with trembling -- remember this later
when you are salted
and worn and possibly thought worthy.
Wear your fear, an amulet around your neck,
as people wear the scars of skin and soul you place on them.
Remember fear. Use it to bless.
You must confess that the air between you
exchanges freely, as do prejudice, memory,
pheromones, fatigue, experience.
Remember breathing. It bonds you
to other breathers.
Inhaling is an act of hearing.
Listen carefully.
The stories are amazing.
You are Horatio, Hercules, Odysseus
draped with trappings, lacking narrative as yet.
Do not presume you are as human as the ones you treat.
This is not an asset.
Search the earth. Learn from the dust. It teaches much.
Dissection's little distance is illusion.
Love the dust with its skin back on.