Balm for the soul: When poetry meets medicine

Kelley Swain, contributor

Nick MacKinnon, winner of the NHS section of the 2012 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (Image: Reproduced by permission of the Hippocrates Press)

Poetry and medicine may appear an unusual combination, but can prove an effective cocktail for patients and poets alike.

For Jo Shapcott, her experience of cancer and its treatment inspired her poetry book, Of Mutability, which won the 2011 Costa Book Award. Last Saturday, Shapcott read from her works at the 2012 International Symposium for Poetry and Medicine at the Wellcome Trust in London. In her poem Hairless, she explores the impact of chemotherapy on her body: where she describes "the nature of the skin" as "newborn-pale, erection-tender stuff".

So what is it that makes the mix of poetry and medicine so potent? "The body is a site of drama for poets", Shapcott explains.

It is this common ground that the symposium founders aim to highlight. This small group of researchers - clinical pharmacologist Donald Singer, writer Michael Hulse, and Literature postdoc Sorcha Gunne - from the University of Warwick were convinced that the poetry and medicine crossover deserved more attention and set up the symposium in 2010 to provide a space where doctors and writers could come together and discuss the multiple facets of uniting the disciplines.

They did just that at Saturday's symposium. Where poetry was a source of inspiration for Shapcott, it proved an effective therapeutic aide for one patient of nurse Sue Spencer. Poetry allowed Spencer?s patient, who suffered from advanced MS, to rediscover herself, giving her back what she called a ?worthwhile identity?. Spencer helped her produce a 15-poem pamphlet, which markedly improved her patient?s mood and sense of self at the end of her life.

Poetry is not just for patients, though. Paediatric surgeon and Member of European Parliament Eleni Theocharous is a widely-translated, award-winning poet, whose work draws on terrifying, sublime first-hand experiences from her work in the world?s most war-torn areas. To a rapt symposium audience, she described carrying "three or four children, with blood running down my body?[this contributed to] the poetry of a surgeon". Theocharous?s language evocatively juxtaposes the perseverance of life with the destruction of war: she described "the taste of white strawberries picked from unprotected minefields" and how the memory worked its way into her writing.

The symposium is home to the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. The prize boasts the biggest monetary award for a single poem and aims to unite poetry and medicine.

Awards are divided into a category for those who work in the NHS, and an open category. Mary Bush won the Open Award for her poem Women?s Work (see below), which explores tissue engineering. Her vivid poem came from reading about the work of renowned stem cell scientist Doris Taylor. ?The medical details of this process were a perfect metaphor for poetry,? said Bush upon accepting her award.

The winning poem for the NHS Award grew from first-hand experience. Nick MacKinnon?s Claybury (see below), in which he imagines the changing role of a psychiatric hospital from the point of view of a local landmark, was informed by his own experience as an auxiliary nurse on a psychogeriatric ward in the early 80s. By taking the viewpoint of a long-standing architectural feature, MacKinnon highlights the change over time in psychiatric treatment for patients.

This year?s winning poems were described as ?literary x-rays? by medical professor and prize judge Rod Flower. The ensuing anthology produced from the year?s shortlist is a fine example of the engagement of verse with medicine.

Claybury
by Nick MacKinnon

Before the lunatics could find asylum
there had to be this chess piece water tower
in Victorian high-gothic: five flights
up to a gabled tank kept out of sight
behind a frieze of blind lancet windows.

Clocklessly it supervised the regime
of cleanliness, its daily shadow sweep -
male chronic, male acute, male epileptic,
female epileptic, female acute, female chronic -
solstice to solstice as a century passed.

It drove the Roding Valley aquifer
along the branching copper axons,
down to the vast pressure cookers,
around the laundry's steam mangle,
inside laboratory condenser jackets,

through asbestos-lagged service tunnels,
out of the delouser's scalding nozzle,
into strapped baths for hydropathy,
enamel basins in the nurse's quarters,
patented cisterns and the chapel font.

It stood complicit in the autoclave's
preparation of stainless lobotomies;
knew the drip of insulin coma therapy;
kept silent while the beige Psychotron
washed a sad brain with threshold current.

And when the cold war tablets came -
Largactil, Acuphase, Seroquel -
it drained itself, glass by glass,
down the salt-glazed Doulton sewer pipes
into the Roding's sluggish sanity.

Women's Work
by Mary Bush

To make a heart from scratch, even tiny,
mouse-sized, she was surprised to find
that soap was best. No chemicals, reagents,
electrospinning, leaching: none of it

as good as common soap. The soap was best
for flesh. An elegant solution:
when concentrated in the lab,
the steady drip strips the donor heart

of once-living cells. A lung requires ?
hand-washing, the bluish marbled meat
dissolved, the pulmonary tree exposed,
the delicate hollows symmetrical, alveolar.

The liver is simpler, mere reduction, translucent
as tallow and ashes. The first soap
was gleaned from sacrifice. A thousand years ago,
she would have cast bones and entrails

to burn, boiled fat, scrabbled in the fire
for cinders. A body is made clean from the flesh
of another body. All around her, ghost hearts,
ghost lungs, faint superstructures of cartilage

glowing like radium. Today, she will deliver
life, infusing organ scaffolds with broth,
draping small galaxies in a swath of stars,
pluripotent tissue cells hung

like pale fabric. Not yet stained
with rude blood, her mouse heart waits
to beat, the lungs to breathe, silent
in amniotic glass, dumb life

re-assembling. Common as birth.
She could be making cutwork lace.
She could be on her knees to wash
the stillborn lamb for rendering.

Copyright for the poems rests with the authors.

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