PHYSICIAN WELLNESS
LIFT UP YOUR HEART
By Dr. Jack Coulehan
On the evening of April 7, 2022, Business Council for
the Arts (BCA) and the Texas Health Foundation,
supported by the Lupe Murchison Foundation,
hosted the pre-eminent physician poet, Dr. Jack
Coulehan for a public evening of conversation
with Dr. John Harper, founder of Intersections: Evidence Based
Medicine and Compassion Intersecting at the Bedside.
Additional support was provided through BCA’s Arts and
Health program by UT Southwestern Medical Center, NorthPark
Center, and the Jane Nelson Institute for Women’s Leadership
at Texas Women’s University. The Dallas Medical Journal was
Lift Up Your Heart
By Dr. Jack Coulehan
The Talking Cure: New and
Selected Poems
An ER treatment room at 2AM.
On a gurney, a mangled body
cops brought in — resisting.
Awakened from a stupor, the beast
curses me, straining at straps
across his chest and hips. His vision
bleeding — confusion, fear, loathing.
Muscles at the back of my neck tense,
fi ngernails scrape across slate.
A package of tools on a tray.
As I begin to stitch the edges
of the man’s wound, he twists his head,
spits at my too-close face, a glob
hits my eyebrow; a second, my mask.
No let-up. The cops will soon be back
to process my patient
and put him into the system
he resisted.
If I squeeze a portion of my heart
in a press, will a few drops
of compassion drip into my cup?
proud to serve as a strategic partner, along with Deep Vellum
Books and NAMI (the National Association of Mental Illness).
The poem below, Lift Up Your Heart, fi rst appeared in Dr. Coulehan’s
most recent book, The Talking Cure: New and Selected
Poems, Plain View Press, LLC, copyright 2020 Jack Coulehan.
Biography of Dr. Jack Coulehan:
Poet, physician, and medical educator, Jack hails from
Western Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Saint Vincent
College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, followed by the University of
Pittsburgh Medical School. He completed his internal medicine
residency at the University of Pennsylvania and North Carolina
Baptist Hospitals, Wake Forest University, and later earned an
MPH from the University of Pittsburgh.
Jack served on the Navajo Reservation in the Indian Health
Service and later practiced at an inner-city clinic while an Associate
As-
Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of
Pittsburgh. As a Professor of Medicine and Preventive Medicine
at Stony Brook University, he directed the medical school’s clinical
and academic programs in medical ethics and pioneered
its Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and
Bioethics.
Jack’s essays, poems, and stories frequently appear in
medical journals and literary magazines, and his work is widely
anthologized.
He is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The
Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems (Plain View Press, 2020).
His other books include Blood & Bone and Primary Care (University
of Iowa Press), two co-edited anthologies of poems by
physicians; Chekhov’s Doctors, a collection of Anton Chekhov’s
medical tales (Kent State University Press); and an award-winning
textbook, The Medical Interview: Mastering Skills for Clinical
Practice (F. A. Davis Co.).
Among Jack’s honors are the Humanities Medal of the
American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and
the Nicholas Davies Scholar Award of the American College of
Physicians for contributions to the humanities in medicine.
Jack is married, has three children and four grandchildren,
and resides in Coram, Long Island, New York. His website is
JackCoulehan.com. DMJ
20 | DALLAS MEDICAL JOURNAL • May 2022