• Age: 13 to 18
• Grade: 8 to 12

John Graham-Pole’s second medical memoir explores the true nature of healing through stories of children and young adults he cared for over his long career as a clinician, teacher and researcher in the field of pediatric oncology and hematology. He explores the many clinical, ethical, philosophical and spiritual issues that arise in the care of young people with illnesses that threatened, and all too often ended, their short lives. Dr Graham-Pole writes: “To my mind, the best doctors bring to their work what Tibetan Buddhists call compassionate objectivity, especially in the care of dying patients…The opportunity to draw so close to another always offers a healing experience for both.”

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John Graham-Pole is a retired professor of pediatrics. He has been a clinician, teacher, and pioneer researcher in the field of childhood cancer for forty years. Educated in Britain, he co-founded the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida, now among the world’s leading arts-and-health organizations. He is an author of thirteen works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He recently published Songlines, the third in a trilogy of novels inspired by young people he has known with cancer. He lives in Nova Scotia with his wife, Dorothy Lander, where they co-founded HARP: The People’s Press (www.harppublishing.ca), a multimedia publishing house dedicated to exploring how the arts can enhance our individual and communal health. This is his second medical memoir—a follow-up to Journeys with a Thousand Heroes. His personal website is www.johngrahampole.com and he can be found on Facebook and LinkedIn.

I was fortunate to work with John Graham-Pole for much of his forty-year career in medicine, and I’ve seen how he heals himself and others through loving kindness, humour, empathy. and love. Healing by Intent recounts the stories by which he does this healing. Each chapter of this beautiful memoir is a story from his personal or professional life. Some of the stories recount his personal journey, but most are stories of his heroes—those children with cancer who bore their disease with dignity and grace and who helped him to heal himself and others. He shows us how he was comforted by comforting, how his inner resources and his Quaker faith helped him through difficult times, and how the children inspired him. In my favourite story—“Origin of an Epidemic”—he recounts the physical, psychological, legal and ethical dilemmas of those young heroes with hemophilia affected by HIV in the first years of this pandemic. Earlier, John tells us that “everyone has a story, everyone is a story,” and he offers proof of this in his beautiful, authentic collection of stories from his personal and professional life.

- Paulette Mehta, MD, MPH, Professor of Hematology & Oncology; Poetry Editor, “Medicine and Meaning”, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences