The Art Of Medicine In Metaphor A Collection Of Poems And Narratives

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.

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.

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.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Forewords -- Preface: forewarned -- Acknowledgements -- 1 The recovery of metaphor in medicine -- 2 Metaphors, once down and out, make a comeback -- 3 What do we know about metaphors in medicine and what are the consequences of resisting metaphor? -- 4 'Medicine as war' and other didactic metaphors -- 5 Medical metaphors as resemblances: putting aesthetics to work -- 6 Functions of resemblances in medicine: 'food for thought' -- 7 Metaphors in psychiatry: the embodied mind at its limits -- 8 Metaphors in medical education: the pedagogic imagination -- 9 Poetry, metaphor and the medical imagination -- 10 'Thinking with metaphors in medicine: the state of the art': Part I: the odyssey -- 11 'Thinking with metaphors in medicine: the state of the art': Part II: the tournament joust -- Summary -- Conclusion -- Appendix 1 -- Appendix 2 -- Appendix 3 -- Bibliography -- Index

"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

The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine articulates the ideas, methods, and practices of narrative medicine. Written by the originators of the field, this book provides the authoritative starting place for any clinicians or scholars committed to learning of and eventually teaching or practicing narrative medicine.

Transformative Language Arts, an emerging field and profession, calls on us to use writing, storytelling, theater, music, expressive and other arts for social change, personal growth, and culture shift. In this landmark anthology, Transformative Language Artists share their stories, scholarship and practices for a more just and peaceful world, from a Hmong storyteller and spoken word artist weaving traditions with contemporary immigrant challenges in Philadelphia, to a playwright raising awareness of AIDS/HIV prevention. Read the stories, consider the questions raised, and find inspiration and tools in using words as a vehicle for transformation through essays on the challenge of dominant stories, public housing women writing for their lives, histories and communities at the margins, singing as political action, the convergence of theology and poetics, women's self-leadership, embodied writing, and healing the self, others, and nature through TLA. The anthology also includes “snapshots,” short features on transformative language artists who make their livings and lives working with people of all ages and backgrounds to speak their truths, and change their communities.