February 27, 2019
A rainbow comes
The earth smiles
And I regain
The eyes of a child
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“I loved rainbows as a kid. The colors were fascinating and they appeared like magic out of nowhere. What things did you enjoy as a child? Can you bring them back into your life as an adult? ππ”
Jenelle Jindal writes poems the way a physician works toward a diagnosis: through close attention to what presents itself. Her work uses the compressed lyric to examine the craft of medicine, asking how we describe, teach, and measure what resists easy instrumentation in care. At its deepest, that attention becomes presence, a quality both poetry and medicine demand but cannot fully teach. She studied biological sciences and linguistics at Stanford before training in medicine and neurology at Yale and at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.
The Poet Doctor