The Healing Art

Rafael Campo's argument that poetry reaches where medicine cannot — especially at the bedside of the dying — is not sentimental but clinically earned by a physician who has sat with AIDS patients and watched language do what medicine ran out of tools for. The Lancet's praise and its standing as required reading in medical humanities programs at NYU and elsewhere are well-deserved. Faith communities with traditional views on sexual identity should know that Campo's identity as a gay man is woven openly into the essays; within that context this is a genuinely humane and important book.