1st Edition
Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry
The Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry draws on an international selection of authors to ask what the cultures of poetry and medicine may gain from reciprocal critical engagement. The volume celebrates interdisciplinary inquiry, critique, and creative expansion with an emphasis upon amplifying provocative and marginalized voices.
This carefully curated collection offers both historical context and future thinking from clinicians, poets, artists, humanities scholars, social scientists, and bio-scientists who collectively inquire into the nature of relationships between medicine and poetry. Importantly, these can be both productive and unproductive. How, for example, do poet-doctors reconcile the outwardly antithetical approaches of bio-scientific medicine and poetry in their daily work, where typically the former draws on technical language and associated thinking and the latter on metaphors? How does non-narrative lyrical poetry engage with narrative-based medicine? How do poets writing about medicine identify as patients? Central to the volume is the critical investigation of the consequences of varieties of medical pedagogy for clinical practice.
Presenting a vision of how poetic thinking might form a medical ontology this thought-provoking book affords an essential resource for scholars and practitioners from across medicine, health and social care, medical education, the medical and health humanities, and literary studies.
Introduction: ‘What’s past is prologue’
Alan Bleakley and Shane Neilson
Part 1: Conceptual and practical frames
Chapter 1 Toward a poetics of illness and healing
Laurence J Kirmayer
Chapter 2 The Hippocrates Initiative 2009–2022
Michael Hulse
Chapter 3 Marking time: poetry as subject to narrative in medical education
Shane Neilson
Part 2: Archaeology and genealogy
In celebration of the word: introduction to EP Scarlett's 'Medicine and Poetry'
Shane Neilson and Alan Bleakley
Chapter 4 Medicine and Poetry
EP Scarlett
Chapter 5 Medicine as poetry
John Launer
Chapter 6 What can medicine do for poetry? Poetry’s incursions in the first year of the Canadian Medical Association Journal
Shane Neilson
Chapter 7 Poetry and medicine
Audrey Shafer
Chapter 8 A poet in the clinic
Iain Bamforth
Part 3: Poiesis: metaphor elaborates experience
Chapter 9 Positive negative
Daisy G Bassen
Chapter 10 Embracing metaphor in pain medicine
Peter Stilwell and Christie Stilwell
Chapter 11 Is the author dead in the poetry of disease? Authorship, modern poetry, and medical language
Daniel A Romero Suarez
Chapter 12 Nourished by experiences: meaning without metaphysics in the poetry of Dannie Abse
W Richard Bowen
Chapter 13 Debriding the moral injury
Tolu Oloruntoba
Part 4: Neurodiversity and the colonizing of the other
Chapter 14 Alda Merini and the making of lyrical psychiatry
Marta Arnaldi
Chapter 15 Dear GP: psychiatry in the spotlight
Elisabeth Kumar
Chapter 16 The prairies always see you: a poetics of psychosis
Erin Soros
Chapter 17 The capaciousness of uncertainty: from standing over to becoming alongside
Jiameng Xu
Chapter 18 Sylvia Wynter and the poetics of psychiatry
Bahar Orang
Chapter 19 Psychiatry’s turf and poetry’s field
Alan Bleakley
Part 5: The intimate soma
Chapter 20 Body-related poetry therapy in psycho-oncology
Alfonso Santarpia
Chapter 21 Oncology and poetry: the case of Patrick Kavanagh
Martin Dyar
Chapter 22 Clinical time and the poetry collection
Alastair Morrison
Chapter 23 Timecrevasses and breathcrystals: how poetry and philosophy can refresh an instrumental medicine to re-engage patients
Martina Ann Kelly and Megan EL Brown
Part 6: Unsettling poetry and pedagogy
Chapter 24 Medicine, poetry, and Iris Murdoch’s invitation towards unselfing
Monica Kidd
Chapter 25 Can poetry be used as a tool to enhance or maintain fine motor surgical skills?
Sarah Fraser and Jessica Chaytor
Chapter 26 Unsettling medicine’s coloniality: poetry’s (missed?) anticolonial potential in medical education and practice
Sarah de Leeuw
Chapter 27 When caged birds sing: Black critical feminist poetry as a tool for political resistance, empowerment, and healing
Thirusha Naidu and Lynne Richards
Chapter 28 Creative writing in medical education
Michael Hanne
Chapter 29 On the reading list for all trainee medics: Autobiography of a Marguerite by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle
Johanna Emeny
Chapter 30 Has the poetry of medicine burnt out?
Sophie Ratcliffe and Andrew Schuman
Conclusions
Shane Neilson and Alan Bleakley
Biography
Alan Bleakley is Emeritus Professor of Medical Education and Medical Humanities at Plymouth University Peninsula Medical School, UK.
Shane Neilson is a poet, physician, and health humanities scholar who teaches at the Waterloo Regional Campus of McMaster University, Canada.
