May 5, 2019
How long it took
To make a flower?
Start with a good root—
Grow hour by hour
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“We're often so amazed by the flower in a plant. But it took so much work it took to get there - having good roots, stem, and leaves. So too with the things we do in our lives - they take time to grow #inchbyinch. 🌷😊”
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