The English poet Elizabeth Jennings has captured, with lucid, lyrical precision, her experiences of illness, both as a surgical and a psychiatric patient.1 In a series of eight poems called Sequence in a Hospital (1964), she evokes the isolation and terror that precedes surgery and, in Night Sister, describes the values of the healing art: ‘ You have a memory for everyone; None is anonymous and so you cure. What few with such compassion could endure.’ In the poem A Mental Hospital Sitting Room from the book The Mind has Mountains (1966), Jennings writes with aching honesty about depression and madness: ‘It is as if a scream were opened wide, a …