Complete Physical will appeal to physicians and patients alike, which includes most of the multitude. Doctors can read the book and sympathize with its complaints; patients can read it and know the mind of their doctor better.

Shane Neilson’s accustomed fascination with the two great subjects, love and death, has taken a purely professional interest: he has written a poetry that has fused his typical poetic concerns with that of his profession as a physician. The poems are primarily lyrics, but there is the occasional villanelle and sestina amidst a squalid sea of punchy narrative; all of the poems ponder what it means to be ill, and some of them celebrate what it means to get better. Some poems even consider the tragic point when illness becomes identity. In every poem his ‘patients’ come alive, but the main character is that of the observant doctor, chiding, cheerleading, sometimes just doing his duty.

Table of contents

Part One: White Coat

Standard Advice
The Doctor Readies The Breathing Tube
The Death of Leo Emberson, November 2006
The Death of Josie
Letter to Leo
Terminus
Pain
Campanology
Curing Blindness
Ten thoughts before the stroke
Before (Doctor Monologue)
After (Patient Monologue)
Penny has Parkinson’s
Old Anatomy Textbooks
Prescription Pad
On Conducting Complete Physicals
Testing 1, 2, 3
The Test
Inside the Examining Room
Love Squawks Through Technology
Christ Child in the Incubator
The Missed Appointment
On-Call Song: To My Wife
Reading Electrocardiograms
Love Poem For the Doctor’s Wife
Love Poem For The Doctor’s Wife Revisited
The heart is statutory
Ode to Stealth

Part Two: Black Bag

Song of the Most Responsible Physician
Irony is the Wrong Diagnosis
Dr. Grinch
Fairygodmother, MD
The Doctor Will See You Now
Secrets my Stethoscope Told Me
The dugouts of misery
No ill effects
Why we suffer: a conversation
My Illness
My Illness, revisited
Taking charts home after work
The law of gravity
Reading H. L. Mencken
How Doctors Think

Review quote

‘The book shines a light on the amazing resilience of humans, on unrealistic expectations placed on doctors, on the emotional trauma of treating untreatable pain, on regrets for past errors, on impersonal technology, and on pessimism in the professions.... It is heavy stuff, but achieves much more than therapy for the writer. In its fearless contemplation of pain and death, Complete Physical celebrates the pervasive beauty and power of love.’

—Phil Gravelle, Erin Advocate

Review quote

‘In New Brunswick-born Shane Neilson’s latest poems, the doctor continues to find inspiration in medicine. His verse is clinical and carefully executed, like surgery. It’s a pulse beating in step with the cold, old anatomy diagrams dissecting the body. But what Neilson cuts into here isn’t diagramed flesh and bone, but his own heart yearning for love in a life surrounded by death and sickness.... His only prescription? Love.’

—Telegraph-Journal

Author comments

I have a book of medical poems coming out with the Porcupine’s Quill in the Spring of 2010. As usual, I had trouble coming up with a title (this will be my fifth book, it doesn’t get any easier.) Titles always come late with me, as I find it difficult to sum up an entire collection in just a few words. For a year I debated White Coat, Black Bag: it had the right ring to it, the white coat suggesting all that is good in medicine, as if the coat were the white hat of a good guy, and the black bag suggesting black art. Indeed the book has two personalities: the first section will make my residency professors at Memorial University proud, for it is empathetic and supportive. The second section is more circumspect, wondering how it is that people contribute to their own illnesses, and is overtly frustrated. But the provisional title came to ground when my editor warned me of a CBC Radio program of a similar name, and for several months I suffered the anxiety of an author without a title. I debated the default position, naming the book after a favourite poem, but that seemed inadequate. Luckily, my publisher came up with a simple and elegant title: Complete Physical.

I think the new title does say it all: physicians must be thorough, their assessments ‘complete’. And every office visit provides an opportunity, in being complete, to seek the truth. My physicals are divided into halves: the first part gathers history, learning what transpired in the past year, how the new is new and the old is the same or changing. The second part leverages that information against the patient’s own body, seeking quickly for clues (the symptom of chest pain leading to the finding of a heart murmur) but also checking out the parts that the patient is not complaining of.

How do the poems do this? Well, there is the trick of the anecdote: certainly some patients have struck me more than others, and their predicaments worth a poem. Medicine is a means of knowing a person, and some of the poems try to take on the patient’s raiment. Yet they are written from my perspective, and so have a dual life. There are other poems that take on certain diseases, sly poems that try to terrify, although the image of the doctor tempers that terror. And other poems display my misgivings about medicine, about being privileged in the way that we are, to see so much suffering, nobly and ignobly borne. Nobly and ignobly witnessed!

My favourite poems are not ambiguous and interpretable in myriad ways; they are ambivalent, the equivalent of cherishing and despising a thing simultaneously. The most interesting part of a physical exam is a social history, the part where I learn how patients live their lives, and often discover information about how they will die them. The poems in the book freight complicity with beauty, they tend my flock not with judgement but with rueful wonder. During the ‘cpx’, as my day sheet nicely abbreviates, I am a seeker, trying to find out information. The poems are exercises in answering the most important question the cpx begs: how are we to live in this world? The poems make that question tangential, they throw in details to make the poem fastenable, real, but they are always answering in earnest.

Excerpt from book

On Conducting Complete Physicals

If love were a diagnosis,
I would chase it in a field of MRI machines
gone all blinky from delirium,
magnets gone randy.
If the insurance form said, Check all that apply:
Love, Lovesickness, Jealousy, Possessiveness,
all of it would be insurable in bouquets and chocolates.

If love were my diagnostic quarry
I’d hunt it like Cupid,
readying my quiver: Have you ever been in love?

With a Yes answer there would be a ritual cigar;
with No, a glass of bourbon.

It seems to me a more pertinent question
than the latest burp or cough.
But if there was a diagnosis,
and it was love,
would I order an unlovely blood test
to confirm, would I measure love’s telltale bump
with my hands, remarking on colour, border, size,
and consistency?

There would have to be a treatment for love.
What would it be?

Unpublished endorsement

‘Unlike most professions that find themselves expressed in poetry, doctors share one important thing with poets: an obsession with death. Shane Neilson has turned that obsession — and the special deathwatching vantage of his medical trade — into a collection of poems as beguiling and as brave as any I have recently read. In a clinical universe where suffering is distanced by language, Complete Physical becomes a kind of extraordinary talking cure. The human predicament has rarely found itself in such good hands.’

—Carmine Starnino

Unpublished endorsement

‘The carefully crafted poems of Complete Physical draw on Neilson’s experiences as a doctor to explore the limits of compassion. The poems express both the empathy of the doctor for the suffering of his patients and the steely-eyed detachment needed to survive in so much anguish and death. Neilson uses the discipline of rhythm and metaphor to speak directly to both the pain in illness and the joy of the life well lived in ways that recall the best of Alden Nowlan.’

—Ross Leckie

Unpublished endorsement

‘In the great tradition of poetry by doctors, Complete Physical arrives not as a book of spare notes pinned to the refrigerator, but with all the gore, heroics, tender compassion, and sorrow of the dedicated physician washing his hands of the bloody day. Shane Neilson is a fine poet.’

—George Murray