BOSTON – Rafael Campo, MD, a physician and poet, has been appointed Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
The office is based in the Center for Education, where Campo’s initial efforts will include coordination of undergraduate and graduate programs to enhance minority recruitment and retention at Harvard Medical School and BIDMC, and collaboration with colleagues in faculty development and academic careers to increase supports for minority faculty at BIDMC.
«Rafael’s medical practice has focused on individuals from underserved and minority populations, and both his medical and artistic careers have been directed to furthering understanding of the human condition and empathic care,» said Richard Schwartzstein, MD, Vice President of Education and Associate Division Chief of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine.
Campo is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at BIDMC where his medical practice serves mostly Latinos, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered people, and people with HIV infection.
Campo is a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco in 1995. In 2001, he was the recipient of both the Faculty Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Harvard Medical School, and the Humanism in Medicine Award. Campo received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Amherst College in 2004, and is the 2009 recipient of the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award for humanism in medicine, awarded by the American College of Physicians.
An essayist and poet, he is the author of The Other Man Was Me (Arte Público Press, Houston, 1994), which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; What the Body Told (Duke University Press, Durham, 1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; and The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire (W.W. Norton, New York, 1997), a collection of essays now available in paperback under the title The Desire to Heal, which also won a Lambda Literary Award, for memoir.
His poetry and prose have appeared in many major anthologies and in numerous prominent periodicals, including DoubleTake, JAMA, the Kenyon Review, The Lancet, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, the New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Out, Paris Review, The Progressive, Salon.com, Slate.com, Threepenny Review, Yale Review, and the Washington Post Book World.
His work has also been featured on the National Endowment for the Arts website and on National Public Radio.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a patient care, teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and consistently ranks among the top four in National Institutes of Health funding among independent hospitals nationwide. BIDMC is clinically affiliated with the Joslin Diabetes Center and is a research partner of Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox. For more information, visit www.bidmc.org .
