Choosing Distance: Medical Professionalism and Poetry

Poetry, through its visceral immediacy and catalyzing of human emotion, has the power to close distances. Many argue that recent technological advancement has created the opposite, a loss of interpersonal connection, but the experience of alienation or simply growing apart is innate to the human condition, sometimes necessarily accompanying personal growth. In fact, developing professional relationships within health care has long grappled with fostering appropriate distance between physicians a...