In the 250 years since its founding as the first medical school in America, the Perelman School of Medicine has produced many alumni and trainees who have gone on to gain the highest honors in a variety of medical fields. So far, however, there has been only one to achieve eminence in the field of literature. A seemingly tireless writer who produced many volumes of poetry, prose, drama, and autobiography, William Carlos Williams, MD 1906, was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1963 for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. Along the way, he also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Book Award for Poetry. And all the while, Williams maintained a long practice in pediatrics and general medicine and was for many years chief of pediatrics as what was then known as Passaic General Hospital in New Jersey.
In many ways, Williams, born in Rutherford, N.J., remained a Jersey boy. He entered Penn’s medical school in 1902, after a special examination, when he was only 18. After earning his MD degree, he did internships at hospitals in New York City and traveled to the University of Leipzig for advanced study of pediatrics. But New Jersey drew him back and was his base for the rest of his life.
Although Williams had written some poems before entering medical school, it was at Penn that he met one of the people who had the most influence on his writing. Ezra Pound, whose brilliant career as a poet was eventually overwhelmed by his fascist sympathies, was then an undergraduate. But the young Pound’s outspoken ambition and ideas on poetry and literature proved attractive to the young medical student. Williams began to look beyond traditional verse of rhyme and meter and to try different forms. Despite Pound’s love of things European, Williams sought to develop a more “American” style, full of concrete images and details, sometimes using a more common American speech. He acknowledged the significance of a modernist poem such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but Williams was determined to write poems that did not require, for example, knowledge of mythology. As he later phrased it: “No ideas but in things.”
What Is the Poet’s Business?
It’s likely that Williams’s career as a physician had something to do with his artistic credo. An article on him in The New York Herald Tribune (January 18, 1932) began this way: “Medicine and literature make the best possible combination in a man’s life.” Williams is quoted: “When you are tormented by people’s illnesses, it is a relief to be able to write your emotions down.” The Herald Tribune also noted that he will sometimes jot down his poetic ideas on prescription pads between calls. Later, Williams said that he wanted to write about the people who were close to him, not in the abstract. “That is the poet’s business. Not to talk in vague categories but to write particularly, as a physician works, upon a patient, upon the things before him, in the particular to discover the universal.”
This does not mean that all of Williams’s work is crystal clear. Even Pound, in fact, criticized one of his books as “incoherent.” Williams would also mix genres, which could throw some readers off. One of his more daunting works may be
Paterson, eventually consisting of five volumes, all about the people, geography, and history of the New Jersey city. It even includes letters from another New Jersey poet who attained fame, Allen Ginsberg.
One of Williams’s poems that is often anthologized demonstrates his urge to avoid the grandiose and obscure, to speak more directly but artistically. “This Is Just to Say” could very well have been dashed off on a pad (if not one for prescriptions) and stuck on a refrigerator:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
A poem that seems to allude to his other profession appears in an early collection called Spring and All (1923). It begins “By the road to the contagious hospital.” Williams then evokes a rather bleak landscape, with cold winds, dried weeds, trees “with dead, brown leaves under them.” Then in the short poem comes the turn: “Lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches -–” Spring is not yet an obvious powerful force, but there is a growing sense that things are starting to change. The last lines:
One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance -- Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
Here the lack of a period at the end of the poem seems quite functional!
A Legacy Lives On
The University of Pennsylvania did not overlook Williams’s achievements in his chosen fields. In 1952, he received an honorary degree. More recently, the poetry prize for the best original poems by a Penn graduate student (in any school) was named the William Carlos Williams Prize, presented jointly with the Academy of American Poets.
The spirit of Williams lives on at Penn Medicine in a different way as well. A fourth volume of Stylus, which describes itself as “a medical humanities literary and art journal,” has recently been posted. The editors have connections with the University and with medicine, and most of the contributors in the new issue are medical students and PhD candidates here. There are also pieces by an assistant professor of clinical neurology at HUP and a staff chaplain at HUP. The faculty advisors are Horace DeLisser, MD ’85, associate professor of Medicine and head of Penn Med’s Spirituality, Religion, and Medicine program, and Zachary Meisel, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Emergency Medicine and a frequent columnist for Slate and for Time.com.
The form and topics of the new Stylus vary widely, and many catch your attention. One of the prose pieces that touches most directly on the practice of medicine is “Grey Zone of the White Coat,” by Avi Baehr, a medical student at the Perelman School who is completing a fellowship in health policy in Washington, D.C. Here she grapples with one of the inevitable responsibilities of the physician, being able to pick yourself up when a patient’s condition worsens and prepare to face your next patient with full attention:
This was my first real taste of what it can mean to don the white coat and have the privilege of practicing medicine. It means seeing a horrible thing happen to a grandfather with a kind face. It means walking across the hall and plastering on a smile because I’ve committed not only to do-no-harm but to do good by that other patient, too. And he needs to have that reassurance that my mind isn’t elsewhere. It means sitting down with a wife while her husband is in surgery and saying, “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” knowing she isn’t hearing a word that’s coming out of my mouth but hoping that she derives some small comfort from my stopping by in a crisp white coat with a stethoscope around my neck.
Dr. Williams would no doubt sympathize.