Dr Richard Ratzan gives us a commentary on his poem “Congenital Glaucoma, published in BMJ Medical Humanities, and explains why he decided to write about this case using the sonnet form.

This little girl – she was probably about 13 or 14; I don’t remember since it was about 10 years ago – was from Mexico, almost certainly illegally but I do not remember that for certain either. She was with 2 or 3 boys her same age. What struck me about the case – and prompted me to write about it – were the following: first, how animatedly happy they all were. In retrospect, given how devastated I was that she was not only blind but preventably so, I was impressed that this misfortune was not precluding their youthful joy. (Whether she was so joyful when the ophthalmologist gave her the official bad news in his office – as he did since I called him about her two days later – I do not know.) Secondly, as someone who makes it a practice to look in at least 3 to 4 sets of fundi a shift – I find it useful and I do not want to lose this skill, as I would were I to use it, as my residents do, only when I “need to”, e.g., for severe headaches or visual problems – I was astounded, as I have not been that many times in my professional life, by the sight of her fundi: each cup was a bottomless pit of featureless whiteness, with vessels falling off into them from the edge of her retina as though falling off the edge of the universe. (I was also acutely aware then, as I write “sight” now in the preceding sentence, of the irony that it was only my good vision that could diagnose her lack of it.) Thirdly, I was struck by how blasé about it my resident, a good PGY3, was. Yet again I marveled at young physicians’ lack of ability to marvel. Is it their lack of experience, the paucity of fundoscopic examinations (not that they do that many these days or ever will accrue a database with which to compare) against which to measure medical horror when they see it? Or is it simply a different attitude they bring to work, an unwillingness or youthful inability to see the wonder of clinical medicine when it rears up in front of you? It is not callousness, at least in this young resident’s case. And fourthly and lastly, I grieved at the tragedy of her being born in Mexico without the resources we in the U.S. take for granted. If her parents here had noticed her trouble seeing as a younger girl – as I am sure hers in Mexico had – she would have gone to an ophthalmologist and – case closed – gotten preventive therapy. No blindness. Which is why, as someone who knew little girls like this when I used to spend a lot of time in Mexico, I referred to it as a sacrifice – a sacrifice of Mexico’s poverty and inadequate health care. A sacrifice I tried to make more historical and poetic with references to pre-Columbian mythology.

Why a poem, and why and how a sonnet? I have been interested in telling medical stories, vignettes, case histories, in verse for years since there is an economy to verse and a freedom “to tell all the truth, but tell it slant” [ref 1], a quotation (the title of the poem, actually) from Emily Dickinson that my late physician-poet friend, John Stone – and a far greater poet than I – liked to invoke whenever he was asked the same question – why poetry? But why a sonnet and not a villanelle [ref 2] or a sestina [ref 3]? It is the liberating mode of poetry and the simultaneous discipline, the challenge, of packing everything into a tightly defined package of a sonnet’s 14 lines. First I must squeeze the facts of the case into the octet, the first 8 lines, and then the exposition of the ideas, which exposition will only work if I have been successful in the first 8 lines, into the terminal sestet, the final 6 lines. Although Shakespeare usually uses the last two lines as the “volta” (Italian for “turn”, the axis point at which the poet gets to the crux of the poem) of the sonnet, I almost always follow the Petrarchan model using a sestet to “wrap up” the case. What I find most challenging is the tension between being too economical – writing solipsistically cryptic references only I understand – and prosaically literal. The former borders on the opaque (Wallace Stevens can pull it off; I can not). The latter is the case history we have all learned to use when dealing with other medical listeners. In between is poetry. As my second son said with amazement some years ago, upon hearing that I had attended a standing-room-only poetry reading by Mary Oliver at Smith College, wondering what the big deal was about poetry, “Poetry is incomplete prose. There are words missing.” (I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his definition of poetry was a veritable haiku. I did not want to ruin his day.)

References

1. Dickinson, Emily. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”. Poetry Foundation. Accessed May 5, 2017.
2. Williams CK. “Villanelle of the Suicide’s Mother”. Reviewed by Ratzan RM. Accessed May 5, 2017.
3. Hadas, PW. “To Make a Dragon Move: From the Diary of an Anorexic. Reviewed by Donley C. Accessed May 5, 2017.