In a recent issue of the medical journal Chest, alongside papers about transbronchial needle aspiration and nontuberculous mycobacteria disease, appeared four poems. One of them was “An Intern’s Recollection of a Night at the V.A., July 2004,” by the Vanderbilt University anesthesiologist Doug Hester. In ten lines, the intern in question relates a hospital drama—a patient in trouble, “a new chest tube to suction”—and concludes with a superior’s pithy, annihilating verdict on the intern’s performance: “the needle was / in the wrong place, / just like me.”

Chest began publishing poems regularly in 2008, with the idea that poetry is “a tool physicians may use to express or visit that whole vastness beyond their scientific intellect,” as the journal’s poetry editor, a Boston pulmonologist named Michael Zack, wrote in an editorial at the time. Other medical journals that print poetry include the Annals of Internal Medicine, Neurology, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), each of which features verse by laypeople as well as by medical professionals. Some outlets select poems with a particular medical focus. In Chest, for instance, the preference is for poetry that deals with pulmonary issues—lung cancer, asbestosis, sleep apnea. (It runs under the rubric “Pectoriloquy,” which refers to an unusual intelligibility of the patient’s voice as it is heard through the chest wall with a stethoscope.) Neurology is partial to poems about treatment of the nervous system, loosely interpreted. “It can be anything from complaints about the amount of paperwork to reflections on the death of a child,” Anne McCammon, a San Diego neurologist who edits the journal’s humanities section, told me.

The poetry itself ranges widely in style and tone. In May, the open-access International Journal of Medical Science Research & Practice published a poem by Sanjeev Narang, a pathology professor in Indore, India, called “Ulcerative Colitis,” whose first lines are: “Begins in the rectum and backwards it goes / No mercy to any part of colon it shows.” Elsewhere, a grim syndrome known by the acronym POEMS has, for obvious reasons, inspired special poetic interest. Alexandre Poppe, writing in Neurology, called it “a disease whose letters conceal / A casualty list of devastated organs.” Amir Steinberg, in Oncology Times, offered an appraisal that perhaps only a doctor could appreciate:

Enlarged organs abound

Even monoclonal gammopathy!

Involvement of the skin!

Increased hemoglobin and platelets!

Increased fluid retention!

The meditation ends: “Understand that POEMS / Usurps the poetry of the human body.”

Other medical-journal verse, however, is more accessible to non-specialists. Adam Possner, a physician in Washington, D.C., who co-edits the section for poetry and miniature stories in Families, Systems, & Health, has written spare lines about prostate surgery and the Epley maneuver, a treatment for vertigo, but his poems can also tend toward the whimsical. In “Drug Holiday,” for instance—the title alludes to a period of time during which a patient is temporarily taken off medication—Possner’s speaker addresses a pill, inviting it to remain inside its bottle:

You work so hard,

with little thanks,

toiling nonstop

in the wet heat,

the airless dark

Medicine and poetry have long been intertwined. The Islamic thinker Avicenna, who was born in 980, summarized his “Canon of Medicine,” one of the foundational encyclopedias of early medical knowledge, in a poem. It was written in rajaz metre, whose structure made it particularly easy to remember, and disseminated throughout medieval Europe in Latin translation. (Avicenna’s advice on dealing with convalescents: “Try to lift their spirit through welcome words and pleasant company; / Give them sweet-scented perfumes and flowers.”) Today, many medical schools offer courses that bridge medicine and the humanities, arts, and social sciences, on the supposition that, say, literature hones students’ empathy and their capacity for observation in ways that immunology cannot. Johanna F. Shapiro, Possner’s co-editor at Families, Systems, & Health, directs the program for medical humanities at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. “You think a patient is going to be like a well-organized essay, but what you really get is a poem,” she told me. “You’re not sure what they mean, and they don’t tell you everything all at once, up front.”

Part of what makes the poems published in medical journals like Chest so piquant, aside from subject matter, is context. They appear alongside scientific studies—accounts of double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trials and the like—pieces of writing that are models of rationality and logic, and that require stripped-down, clinical language and do away with anecdote and allusiveness. In these studies, which often follow a rigorous structure—introduction, methodology, results, conclusion—“you narrow the amount of interpretability in what you’re saying,” Charlene Breedlove, the poetry editor at JAMA, told me. Poetry, by contrast, “moves in the opposite direction—it moves to open the possibilities of language. It wants to explore unnoticed possibilities.”

Perhaps for this reason, medical journals are not always comfortable perches for the poetically minded. Michael A. LaCombe, a cardiologist in south-central Maine, began editing poetry at the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1990, after making a name for himself as writer of fiction about the medical world (there was a year, his annus mirabilis, when he published thirteen stories in outlets such as the Journal of Emergency Medicine). Early on in his tenure at the Annals, LaCombe visited the journal’s editorial offices, in Philadelphia, where he noted that the documents relating to his section were filed under “Fantasy.” It wasn’t that the staff was dismissive of the work, he said, but that to them it occupied a different realm. Two editors subsequently tried to kill his poetry and prose sections. They “were very antithetical to the poetry especially,” he said, though he was saved by surveys that showed the sections to be popular among readers. Now a much more favorably disposed editor is in charge of the Annals, though sometimes still there is no space for LaCombe’s pieces. “I am at the mercy of the science, as that should be,” he said.

Considering the large audiences of many of these journals—JAMA, for example, has a circulation of more than three hundred thousand, ten times that of Poetry magazine—competition to be published in them is modest. Poetry receives a hundred and twenty-five thousand submissions a year and publishes three hundred of them; JAMA receives approximately a thousand, half of which are from physicians, and publishes around fifty. Charlene Breedlove told me that, at one point, about two years ago, she thought that she might have to step down. “It isn’t that poems don’t come in—it’s that they can be really bad, unbelievably bad,” she said. “It’s always a wonder that we get as many decent and sometimes really good poems as we do—well-crafted things, very thoughtful poems.” (Breedlove’s résumé includes editing stints in Tel Aviv and Paris. A Chicagoan with a background in publishing rather than in medicine, she has supervised JAMA’s poetry offerings since 1989. I formed an impression of her as the grande dame of medical poetry.)

The qualities that make for a good submission are the same at medical journals as they are anywhere else, with a few wrinkles. Families, Systems, & Health puts poems through a peer-review process. The publication’s reviewers, medical professionals who may never have evaluated poetry before, are provided with guidelines: Did the poem move you? Did it teach you something about doctoring? “I have seen many reviews where the reviewer goes line by line and makes word suggestions,” Johanna Shapiro told me. “I’ve also gotten reactions like, ‘I have no idea how to review a poem. I don’t think I can do this.’ ” Michael Zack proposes that many of the submissions to Chest, which come mostly from patients or their friends and relatives, would benefit from restraint. Medicine, he said, is an inherently dramatic topic. “The pitfall of ninety per cent of the poems I read is that the poet tries to amplify on this already overamplified subject, and at the end of it you’re sort of drowning in the intensity.” The best medical poems, he said, pursue an elliptical approach. Take “Bossa Nova,” by Gary D. Swaim, which describes a man gathering a woman with multiple sclerosis from her chair and leading her in a dance: