The perfect opener for grand rounds or a patient care conference would be the poem titled "Ten Patients, and Another," terse case studies that, in a very few incisive words (as only poetry can do), encapsulate what the charts document and what they leave out: The patients, "a three-year-old-black male ... [who] ingested what's turned out to be/Cocaine," "a sixty-odd-year-old/white female ... The intern found a bruise behind her ear," "a gay Latino kid ... getting tubed for respiratory failure ... whispered that he's lost the will to live./He pawned his crucifix to get the pills," "a twelve-year-old white female ... gravida zero, no STDs./She's never even had a pelvic ... says it was/her dad. He's sitting in the waiting room." What their bodies tell, what the patients say, what the skillful practitioner intuits, are masterfully fleshed out by a poet who speaks from his own experience and identity as a gay, Cuban-American practicing physician.

Campo knows about secrets, secrets that cripple. He knows, too, that medicine is a deeply spiritual profession, that it is about more than solving problems, that it is about witnessing, respecting, and sharing suffering. Physicians become privy to the most intimate and sacred bonds of the human encounter between physician and patient or lover and lover.

The experiences on both sides of the stethoscope are authentic. Physicians need to be sensitive to the indignities of patienthood. Diagnosed with bone cancer after a skiing accident, Campo receives the results of a scan in the impersonal "Phone Call": "I'm looking at your x-rays here ... I don't want you to worry-just come down/And let us have a closer look. Today./This afternoon if possible ..." The irony is that although it will be rumored that Campo has the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome-"We fell in love/When love was not protection in itself ..." ("Safe Sex")-he seems to have "a cancer. Growing fast as germs." He has become the case study-"A 26 year old ... his CAT scan demonstrating changes within the cortex of the healing bone, consistent with malignancy" ("Just the Facts"). He identifies with his own patients who have end-stage cancer: "more dying waits/Downstairs for me. I almost hear their groans ... As I examine them, I find the tomb/Toward which they lead. I know it is my own" ("The Very Self").

Campo illuminates the healing power of art. Listen to what he says: "I have a cancer in my arm, I write/So I can see it better-on the page ... It's not the cancer, but the thoughts I fear ... It looks so harmless when it's poetry." This slim volume-riveting, provocative, and refreshing-is a gift to the clinician who is trying to re-invoke in his or her students the humility, compassion, and deep caring that brought us all into medicine in the first place.