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' Part 1: Conceptual and practical frames 1.Toward a poetics of illness and healing. 2.The Hippocrates Initiative 2009–2022. 3.Marking time: poetry as subject to narrative in medical education. Part 2: Archaeology and genealogy In celebration of the word: introduction to EP Scarlett's 'Medicine and Poetry' 4.Medicine and Poetry. 5.Medicine as poetry. 6.What can medicine do for poetry? Poetry’s incursions in the first year of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. 7.Poetry and medicine. 8.A poet in the clinic. Part 3: Poiesis: metaphor elaborates experience 9.Positive negative. 10.Embracing metaphor in pain medicine. 11.Is the author dead in the poetry of disease? Authorship, modern poetry, and medical language. 12.Nourished by experiences: meaning without metaphysics in the poetry of Dannie Abse. 13.Debriding the moral injury. Part 4: Neurodiversity and the colonizing of the other 14.Alda Merini and the making of lyrical psychiatry. 15.Dear GP: psychiatry in the spotlight. 16.The prairies always see you: a poetics of psychosis. 17.The capaciousness of uncertainty: from standing over to becoming alongside. 18.Sylvia Wynter and the poetics of psychiatry. 19.Psychiatry’s turf and poetry’s field. Part 5: The intimate soma 20.Body-related poetry therapy in psycho-oncology. 21.Oncology and poetry: the case of Patrick Kavanagh. 22.Clinical time and the poetry collection. 23.Timecrevasses and breathcrystals: how poetry and philosophy can refresh an instrumental medicine to re-engage patients. Part 6: Unsettling poetry and pedagogy 24 .Medicine, poetry, and Iris Murdoch’s invitation towards unselfing. 25.Can poetry be used as a tool to enhance or maintain fine motor surgical skills? 26.Unsettling medicine’s coloniality: poetry’s (missed?) anticolonial potential in medical education and practice. 27.When caged birds sing: Black critical feminist poetry as a tool for political resistance, empowerment, and healing. 28.Creative writing in medical education. 29.On the reading list for all trainee medics: Autobiography of a Marguerite by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle. 30.Has the poetry of medicine burnt out? Conclusions

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.