February 20, 2019
Where have you been
she said
A thousand lands
Inside my head
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“It’s so easy to imagine things as children but we grow unused to it as we get older. What kinds of things did you dream up as a kid that were memorable? 🦄 💭”
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