‘As with a poem, each patient is unique’: the cancer surgeon using poetry to help train doctors

João Luís Barreto Guimarães, a breast cancer specialist and prizewinning poet, is pioneering the teaching of poetry alongside medicine to help trainee doctors empathise with their patients

In an unremarkable lecture hall on a rainy Monday afternoon, Cândida Pereira is expounding passionately on the intricacies of a poem by the Portuguese politician-poet Vasco Graça Moura. Her classmates listen closely as the second-year university student enthuses about lyric form, poetic voice and Moura’s use of “perceptual imagery” and “sensual tone”. Nothing unusual for a standard poetry module, perhaps. Yet once the bell goes, Pereira will repack her well-thumbed poetry anthology and replace it with more prosaic textbooks on neuroanatomy and pharmacology. The 19-year-old is one of 20 or so trainee doctors at Porto University’s medical faculty taking a new elective course on the fundamentals of modern poetry.

In today’s ever more transactional healthcare culture, the initiative signals a belief in the priority of people-centred care and old-fashioned notions of a doctor’s “bedside manner”. As the course creator João Luís Barreto Guimarães explains, poetry has a unique capacity to help students connect holistically with their future patients, as opposed to viewing them as a medical problem in need of fixing.