Commencement 2004: Honorands
Rafael Campo, Class of 1987
Doctor of Literature
Rafael Campo has combined a career as a physician with a second career as
a poet. Practicing general internal medicine with Health Care Associates at Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, he is also an assistant professor
at Harvard Medical School. There, he has developed a curriculum in medicine and
literature, which he says uses literature as a “tool for exploring empathetic
connections between people living with illness and their care providers.”
Campo’s twin interests have deep roots: While at Amherst, Campo won both
the James Olds Neuroscience Prize and the Rolfe Humphries Poetry Prize. Since
graduating, he has received continued recognition for his writing and teaching,
earning the 1995 National Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences Annual
Achievement Award and the 2001 Harvard Medical School-Healthcare Foundation of
New Jersey Humanism in Medicine Award.
Campo is the author of four books of poetry, including What
the Body Told (1996)
and Landscape with Human Figure (2002). He is also the author of the autobiographical
The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and
Desire (1997). A 1987 graduate of Amherst, he returned to the College as
a visiting writer in 1998.
As a gay Latino, Campo has said that he feels an obligation to serve as a positive
role model for Harvard medical students who belong to underrepresented minority
groups. To that end, he has worked to develop a
gay, lesbian, and bisexual health curriculum, while also helping to create a
Latino health clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He has been active
in teaching about HIV and AIDS. He believes strongly that in a diverse society,
physicians need to be competent in addressing issues of sexuality, language,
ethnicity, and race as they affect health practices and access to health care.
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Photo: Michael Zide