//www.igerbera.com en-us Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT Tue, 24 Jan 2023 11:47:04 GMT Silverchair jamams@jamanetwork.org support@www.igerbera.com //www.igerbera.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2800682 Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT “I find that I cannot exist without poetry” proclaimed John Keats, the beloved English Romantic poet who many forget was trained as a physician. Keats practiced medicine for only 7 years before abandoning the profession. The medicine of his day, in early 19th-century London, faced dire challenges we might recognize as not unlike those of our times: long work hours, inadequate resources, harmful superstition and widespread misinformation, rampant and frequently fatal infectious disease. Keats himself would eventually succumb to tuberculosis as a young man aged only 25. Surely such onerous work conditions contributed to his defection from the hospital and propelled him toward the poetry he imagined could be healing, even as he suspected that he was slowly dying from the dread consumption whose symptoms his letters show he knew all too well. 329 4 295 295 10.1001/jama.2022.25105 2800682 //www.igerbera.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2800659 Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT 我爱上你我每次看血,尤其是lly when my own gurgles into a test tube or drib-drabs onto the floor, or when my knees lock from standing too long in one place, or even when I eye a needle pointed at me. Once 329 4 345 345 10.1001/jama.2022.23802 2800659 //www.igerbera.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2800658 Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT This issue’s poem, “Viva Las Vagus,” takes the reader on an appropriately wandering, at times dizzying journey, beginning with its title’s jokey, far-out allusion to, yes, the 1964 Elvis Presley movie. As the poem unspools we veer between playful camp and profound physical experience of our frequently off-kilter world. Though the speaker references the film elsewhere in the poem, in asides like “purple/as Elvis’s ’56 Cadillac” with its trippy enjambment (enjambment is an unpunctuated line break across which words spill from one line to the next) and “I croon,/returning my vagal tone” implicitly evoking The King, the poem’s true subject is the vagus nerve and how it animates us. The speaker juxtaposes what clinicians recognize as classic vagal episodes with wonderfully quirky expressions of parasympathetic tone: “I fall for you every time I look/at blood” (more syncopal enjambment here); or “even when I eye/a needle pointed at me” (the pun in “I eye” at once disorienting, needling the reader, and spot on). The vagus nerve is giddily reimagined here as “dominatrix of the diaphragm,” mysteriously bestowing life via the deep breathing it governs upon “a voodoo sin city doll [another Vegas/vagus evocation]/with a slow leak.” The thread or “tendril” of the vagus nerve indeed meanders through all manner of human experience, as it does through the human body itself and this delightfully nervy poem, reminding us that such uncanny, vagally mediated experiences connect us all. 329 4 345 345 10.1001/jama.2022.24456 2800658 //www.igerbera.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2800426 Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT They reminded me of your parents but better dressed, my wife Jessica said as she described a patient and her husband she had seen in clinic that day—a patient with metastatic breast cancer on her way to hospice but still asking Jessica about her life and family— by which she meant, I think, that they must have been wearing something more dignified than 20-year-old hand-me-down skateboarding T-shirts from their son, by which she meant, I think, that they were warm and gentle and thoughtful, by which she meant, I think, that they valued quality of life over quantity, having seen what happened to their own parents as they lived into their nineties, by which she meant, I think, that they were vulnerable in the same way my parents were becoming vulnerable, by which she meant, I think, that she loved my parents even though she was embarrassed they wore faded Green Day shirts to fancy restaurants, by which she meant, I think, that she would be there for them as they welcomed their end, and for me. 329 3 264 264 10.1001/jama.2022.22867 2800426

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