Johanna Shapiro, PhD
Howard Stein’s Border-Crossing Use of Poetry to Interrogate Clinical Medicine, Medical Education, and Health Care Organizations
This article explores how medical anthropologist Howard Stein’s poetry and his unique practice of sharing this poetry with the patients, physicians, and administrators who inspired it create ways of knowing that are at once revelatory and emancipatory. Stein’s writing shows readers that poetry can be considered as a form of data and as a method of investigation into the processes of the human soul. Furthermore, it represents a kind of intervention that invites health professional readers toward connection, bridge building, and solidarity with their patients and with one another.