“For there will be the arts and some will call these soft data whereas in fact they are the hard data by which our lives are lived
For everyone comes to the arts too late.”
John H. Stone III, MD (1936-2008)
John Stone, physician and poet, died of cancer on November 6, 2008. He spent all of his academic life at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta as Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) and Associate Dean of Admissions. He combined the disciplines of medicine and humanities, always convinced that students of medicine become better practitioners of medicine when experiencing the revelations and joys of literature and music.
I first met John in September 1958 during orientation for the freshman class at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. I had never met anyone from Jackson, Mississippi, a graduate of Millsaps College, nor anyone with both an intense interest in science and a keen knowledge of music and poetry. He displayed some unusual characteristics, quirks I called them. He always carried 3 × 5 cards in his breast pocket along with an ink pen, never a ball point. The notes he kept on these cards were rarely about medicine, but about transient flashes of insight that he jotted down as future reminders for use in essays and poems. He could not study at home, only at the medical school. Every night after dinner with his wife Lu, he was off to the medical school library or an empty laboratory.
After completing a residency in internal medicine at Strong Memorial Hospital/University of Rochester, he moved to Atlanta where he completed a cardiology fellowship with J. Willis Hurst at Emory University School of Medicine. He joined the Emory faculty in 1969. The first half of his academic career was at Grady Memorial Hospital, where he established the residency program in emergency medicine. In 1978 he edited one of the first comprehensive textbooks in this new medical discipline, The Principles and Practice of Emergency Medicine. He spent the second half of his academic career at Emory University School of Medicine as associate dean for admissions. During these administrative years, he continued his clinical joys: teaching students, residents, and cardiology fellows and caring for pediatric patients with congenital heart disease. His students loved him. He won the medical school's best clinical professor award many times.
What made him such a unique physician? The answer is love and success in literature and music. And what became of those quick notes he wrote on those 3 × 5 cards that he always carried with him? They resulted in 5 books of poetry. One of his poems, “Being There,” was written for me and my wife, Sandy, on the occasion of the birth of our second daughter. This was published in his first poetry book, The Smell of Matches (1972). His poetry reflected the joy, wonder, and beauty he found in his everyday world of patients, students, family, and community. His longest poem, “Gaudeamus Igitur,” is a poem of rejoicing, which he recited as graduation speaker at medical school graduation ceremonies at numerous schools. He first read this poem to the graduates of Emory University School of Medicine in 1982.
“For you can be trained to listen only for the oboe out of the whole orchestra
For you will need to strain to hear the voice of the patient in the thin reed of his crying.”
John was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2007.
He believed that teaching humanities to medical students could enrich their lives and strengthen that magic bond between patient and physician. He started the first medical humanities course at Emory and was prominent in the medical humanities movement nationally. For many summers, he taught his Literature in Medicine course and led creative writing workshops at Emory's British Studies Program at University College, Oxford University in England. He co-edited with Richard Reynolds the book, On Doctoring: Stories, Poems and Essays. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has given this book to every medical student in this country since 1991. Many of the essays in his book In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine were published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
John also loved music. Three walls in his family room at home were stacked floor to ceiling with music CDs, mostly classical. He and his present wife Mae played the game of trying to identify which and how many instruments were part of a new or unfamiliar ensemble. The indexing of these hundreds of CDs was in disarray; only Mae could find the familiar piece they wanted to repeat. John and his longtime friend Samuel Jones wrote a choral symphony, “Canticles of Time.” John wrote the libretto, and Samuel composed the music. This symphony won the Music Award of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters in 1991. John, with pianist William Ransom, performed a program called “The Poet and The Pianist” in Carnegie Hall, New York, in 2001.
John left behind 2 sons, John and Jim, a daughter-in-law, Martha, and 2 grandchildren, Sarah and William. John is Clinical Director of Rheumatology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and Jim is a general internist (hospitalist) at Emory Johns Creek Hospital. Lu, John's first wife, died of the ravages of progressive systemic sclerosis. Mae Nelson Stone, his present wife, provided him with love and support so he could continue his joyous journey of living. He would want us to celebrate! As John told many medical students on graduation day,
“For the heart will lead
For the head will explain but the final common pathway is the heart
For what matters finally is how the human spirit is spent
For this is the day of joy
For this is the morning to rejoice
Therefore, let us rejoice
Gaudeamus Igitur.”
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