Poetry and stories about illness address more than just the symptoms of disease. Narratives and poems are the pathways for people to make sense of and discover meaning in life's difficult events. This anthology connects the world of medicine with patients' experience. The lyrical power of patients' voices and the metaphors they use offer insight, empathy, and compassion into the heart of the medical conversation.

"In this book Rafael Campo restores the link between poetry and healing, in lyrical prose that also offers "pharmaceutical" samples of work by a diverse group of poets such as Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, Miroslav Holub, Audre Lorde, Lucia Perillo, and William Carlos Williams. He leads us through the stages of illness and recuperation, from first inklings of mortality, through symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment, and finally recovery or - and here medicine recoils but poetry perseveres - death, and even immortality."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This book explores previously unexamined overlaps between the poetic imagination and the medical mind. It shows how appreciation of poetry can help us to engage with medicine in more intense ways based on ‘de-familiarising’ old habits and bringing poetic forms of ‘close reading’ to the clinic. Bleakley and Neilson carry out an extensive critical examination of the well-established practices of narrative medicine to show that non-narrative, lyrical poetry does different kind of work, previously unexamined, such as place eclipsing time. They articulate a groundbreaking ‘lyrical medicine’ that promotes aesthetic, ethical and political practices as well as noting the often-concealed metaphor cache of biomedicine. Demonstrating that ambiguity is a key resource in both poetry and medicine, the authors anatomise poetic and medical practices as forms of extended and situated cognition, grounded in close readings of singular contexts. They illustrate structural correspondences between poetic diction and clinical thinking, such as use of sound and metaphor. This provocative examination of the meaningful overlap between poetic and clinical work is an essential read for researchers and practitioners interested in extending the reach of medical and health humanities, narrative medicine, medical education and English literature.

"This collection of Howardʼs poetry is a delight to read. His poems speak directly to us. They are accessible, engaging, and, most of all, truthful." Jack Coulehan, M.D. Stony Brook University Medical Center "In the poetry itself, I appreciate Steinʼs sense of moral clarity, the importance of doing the right thing ("Why weʼre here"). A pervasive element throughout these poems is his great empathy for both doctors and the always suffering, sometimes hopeless, resentful patients they serve ("Acronym")..." Johanna Shapiro, Ph.D. Department of Family Medicine University of California-Irvine In the Shadow of Asclepius brings together poems written over a forty-year career of teaching and living in American medicine as a medical, psychoanalytic, organizational, and applied anthropologist. Howard Steinʼs poems from American medicine are the fruit of careful listening, observing, and often bearing witness to peopleʼs experiences and stories. Many poems in this book come from Steinʼs love of and long familiarity with the culturescapes and landscapes of Oklahoma. Through empathy and an inner resonance with the people and situations he evokes, Stein shows how poetry can not only contribute to medical humanities, and more broadly to the humanities in general, but can also hone scientific, clinical acumen as well. That is, poetry can not only enhance self-awareness, empathy, and the doctor-patient relationship, but it can also improve the diagnostic process, the treatment, and the clinical outcome. This book deserves a wide readership among medical educators, practicing physicians, professionals in the clinical behavioral sciences and medical humanities, patients and their families, and all those interested in the lives touched by medicine in the United States.

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.