Stone wrote that the “words growing all over Mississippi” need the poet to listen to them and give them order. Stone sees the duty of the writer to prepare oneself for a “good death” and the poet and the physician as making use of the same materials. In the tradition of poet-physician William Carlos Williams, Stone’s witty, insightful, and sensitive lyrics examine the common threads between literature and medicine. The author or coeditor of On Doctoring and In the Country of Hearts as well as several medical textbooks, Stone chronicled the relationship between the poet’s sensitivity and the doctor’s clinical examination of the human condition.īeginning with The Smell of Matches (1972) and continuing through his final volume, Music from Apartment 8 (2004), Stone’s poetry illustrates the same theme that he brought to the world of medicine: listening to the stories we tell unites us all. Stone also wrote poetry and essays that explore the common threads between literature and medicine. From 1974 to 1985 he worked full time at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, founding and directing its Emergency Medicine Residency Program. In 1969 Stone joined the faculty at Emory, where he founded one of the first medical school courses in literature and medicine, and he later taught the course at Oxford University.

From 1964 to 1966 Stone served in the US Public Health Service, attaining the rank of lieutenant commander. He trained in internal medicine at the University of Rochester and completed a fellowship in cardiology at Emory University in Atlanta. In 1962 Stone received his medical degree from Washington University in St. He married Sarah Lucretia Crymes on 16 August 1954, and the couple went on to have two children, John and James.

Stone earned a bachelor’s degree from Millsaps College in 1958. His father, a production supervisor, died of a heart attack when Stone was a senior at Jackson’s Central High School, where he edited the literary magazine.

Poet, essayist, cardiologist, and lecturer John Henry Stone was born on 7 February 1936 in Jackson to John Stone and Pauline Marler Stone.

In the Country of Hearts by John Stone