Mission & Vision

The Poet Doctor brings several traditions into conversation. It reads physician writing closely. It gathers archives of physician writing from many eras. It uses scholarship and digital methods to make patterns more visible. It shares those insights in public language that can travel beyond a single discipline. Throughout, we read literature and medicine together, and we read each era on its own terms.

Poet Doctor is a medical humanities project. It studies physician writing from about 1350 to today. We read each text as evidence of how medicine thought in its own time and place: what it took as fact, and what it took as right.

Each era's medicine has been revised by the eras that followed. Much of the science in older texts has been replaced, and many of their ethical norms are no longer accepted. Today's medicine will be revised too. Evidence-based medicine is the current standard of care, and we rely on it for medical guidance. We also expect later generations to look back at some of today's certainties, in science and in ethics, with the same distance we feel from earlier eras. From inside any era, it is hard to know which of its views will last.

So we compare eras and frameworks side by side, without treating any one era's views as final. We ask what, if anything, connects them. When medicine replaced outdated science and ethics, it may also have lost some older insight. We recover older texts to study them, not to revive their practice.