“Both Sides of the Bed”: Clinicians and Patients’ Families in Poetry

In “Both Sides of the Bed,” poetry allows clinicians to see their role not as merely technicians but fully embedded caregivers, akin to family members at the bedside. Perhaps most striking is the poem’s honesty about the grammar of medicine, how fluently medicalese conjugates suffering in the third person—until the disease arrives in someone beloved. The speaker, a junior clinician, knows the lexicon: “resection, margins, FOLFOX,/palliative intent.” Yet as a family member standing on the other s...