Both poetry and medicine can present concepts or experiences that are not readily understood by everyone, requiring interpretation and reflection to fully grasp. A recent JAMA article points out that because of its frequent juxtapositions and metaphors, poetry is said to create an uncanny otherworldliness, as experienced in reading poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens. The article posits that similarly, medicine, by constructing its own alternate reality of our familiar physical body via x-ray vision and acronymic medicalese, can also make us feel at once recognizable, and yet not, to ourselves.
