A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine Edited by Corinna Wagner, Andy Brown Bloomsbury, 2016, PB, 560pp, £24.99, 978-1472513298
‘Verse is for healthy
arty-farties. The dying
and surgeons use prose.’
(Peter Reading, ‘From C’, 1984)
This haiku is the first of hundreds of poems related to medicine and the body in this innovative and substantial anthology. The first of its kind of this magnitude, it indicates the growing popularity and influence of the medical humanities.
Each of the eight sections, such as Consuming, Treatment and Hospitals, Practitioners and Professionals, comprises a chronologically arranged series of poems on the relevant topic, followed by a short selection of historical prose writing that provides some context for the verse.
The first section, Body as Machine, for example, includes the inevitable extract from Offray De La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1749): ‘The human body is a machine that winds up its own springs’, but, more surprisingly, ‘Religion and Neurology’ from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) in the prose section.
The poems themselves provide rich seams of material to mine for illustrations for medical writing and for use in group exercises, for example, in communication skills and understanding empathy (and expanding the capacity to express it).
All of life is gathered here. From the humorous:
‘A mighty creature is the germ, Though smaller than the pachyderm.’
(Ogden Nash, ‘The Germ’, 1925)
to the sobering:
‘disease has expanded my horizons and pain
spread the good word.’
(Peter Meinke, ‘The Patient’, 1977)
from ecstatic joy:
‘Oft have I thrilled at deeds of high emprise’
(Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, ‘To Madame Curie’, 1921)
to dark despair:
‘Yes! in the radiant air how could I know How black it is, how fast it is, below?’
(A Mary F Robinson, ‘Neurasthenia’, 1888)
and, of course, from birth:
‘It is birth: at the first breath how curiously the tissue of the lungs flower with the sudden inrush of blood.’
(Jo Shapcott, ‘Twin Found in Man’s Chest’, 2002)
to death:
‘Dead kids upset me.
There’s no drink
to take away the taste
of a fresh face rotting.’
(Dorothy Porter, ‘Dead Kids’, 1994)
and perhaps even beyond:
‘In your afterlife nightie
You are pirouetting expectantly for the last time.’
(Paul Durcan, ‘Golden Mothers Driving West’, 2009)
Poetry, as the book’s foreword suggests, is a way of storytelling ‘that is particularly adaptable to making sense of our experiences of living and dying in a body.’
This volume helps us, as GPs, to do this both for ourselves and our patients.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2016
