John Stone

John Stone is an emeritus professor of medicine (cardiology) at Emory University, but he also has published several collections of poetry, a collection of essays, and edited an anthology of literature and medicine during a career in which he has taught both English literature and medicine at Emory and at Oxford University, England, received the Governor's Award in the Humanities (in 1992), and three times been selected Best Clinical Professor at Emory.

John Stone was born February 7, 1936, in Jackson, Mississippi. He graduated from Central High School and Millsaps College in Jackson before receiving his M.D. degree from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He trained in medicine and cardiology at the University of Rochester and Emory University in Atlanta. In 1969, he joined the Emory medical school faculty and is now Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) Emeritus.

Stone has five books of poetry, a collection of essays, and he co-edited an anthology of literature and medicine. His work has twice received a Literature Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (1986 and 1999). He has received honorary degrees from Miami University, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, and Albany Medical College.

Stone teaches often for Emory College, including the British Summer Studies Program in Oxford, England (Creative Writing and Literature in Medicine). Stone has read and lectured at celebratory events at over 150 institutions in 39 states and given named lectures at Yale, Stanford, Tulane, Vanderbilt, Brown, and the Mayo Clinic. In April 2003 he received the Mastership designation (MACP) from the American College of Physicians.

John Stone’s poetry collections include The Smell of Matches (1972), In All This Rain (1980), Renaming the Streets (1985), Where Water Begins: New Poems and Prose (1998), and most recently, Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems (2004). In 1990 Dell published In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine, a collection of essays about the human heart, both as a physiological organ and a metaphorical symbol of life and emotion. The book was reprinted by LSU Press in 1996.

Stone is co-editor of On Doctoring: Stories, Poems and Essays (Simon & Schuster). The book is presented annually as a gift from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to students entering U.S. medical schools; the book is now in its 3rd edition. Over the last 13 years, more than 200,000 copies have been distributed to American medical students.

(Article first posted June 1999)
(Updated March 2004)