Koenraad Kuiper
Poems are sneaky but each poem is sneaky in its own way. We could say the same about melanomas. And so, sneakily, just like that, a little volcano on the left arm turns wrist watch into risk watch…
Making I contact with the doctor
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Sue Wootton
Recently I talked at the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival as part of a panel of health practitioners who write. Called Word Balm, our session set out to explore what language contributes to the practice of medicine. At the end of a wide-ranging conversation, chair Barbara Brookes called for questions from the audience. A woman raised her hand.
This is all very well,” she said, “but how come my GP looks at the computer screen, not at me, throughout the consultation?”
Ageing poetically
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Janet Wainscott
Some years ago, when my mother was still alive and living in a dementia-level rest home, I sat in a meeting for residents’ family members. The discussion turned to activities. One woman said her mother loved poetry, and asked whether poetry could be included in the activities offered. Someone else endorsed the comment and I thought that it would be something that my poetry-loving mother would enjoy. Nothing happened, but later, after my mother’s death, I decided it was an idea worth pursuing.
I was aware that reading, including poetry, is used in some rest homes and day programmes for older people, but I wanted to go beyond reading, discussion and reminiscence. I looked to Gary Glazner’s Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in the USA, and John Killick’s UK dementia poetry programme, In the Pink, for inspiration and guidance. Both projects combined the sharing of poems (especially well-known poems) with the creation of new poems.
Emergency poet!
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Deborah Alma
Emergency Poet is a piece of theatre, a quack doctor show and also at its heart, a vehicle (pun-intended) for sharing and disseminating poetry. I travel to city centres, festivals, libraries, hospitals, conferences, schools – I have even been to a couple of weddings! My last ‘emergency’ call-out was to a conference of psychotherapists and psychiatrists for the UK National Health Service.
Dressed in a doctor’s white coat and stethoscope and accompanied either by Nurse Verse or a Poemedic, I travel in my vintage 1970s ambulance, which is still fitted with its original stretchers and medical equipment. It’s a mix of the serious and the theatrical. There are skulls, jars of eyeballs and other body parts inside the ambulance, and under an attached awning there is a ‘Cold Comfort Pharmacy’ with Nurse Verse dispensing poems-in-pills for various ailments, including internet addiction and anxiety. There’s even some poetry Viagra.
Art can handle us
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Rata Gordon
I work with young people who are experiencing so-called ‘mental illness’. To me, ‘mental illness’ is a misnomer. What I see are stunningly courageous and sensitive human beings who have somehow come to the conclusion that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Maybe they’ve been told that they shouldn’t look the way they do, or love who they love. Maybe they’ve been denied opportunities, or had their voice shut down. Somewhere along the way, they have internalised this sense of not being good enough.
The Spedale Degli Innocenti: Florence’s Foundling Hospital
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Bruce Summers
I have always considered it a crime, when attending international medical meetings, not to escape the academic ambience of seminar rooms, Powerpoint presentations, labelled lanyards and corporate coffee for the real and less organised world outside. Despite the excellence of the biennial Sixth International Clinical Skills Conference at Monash University in Prato, I felt little guilt in bunking off an afternoon session to visit Florence, just a 25 minute train journey away. I have visited Florence several times before, attracted, like so many other visitors, to the Renaissance art and architecture that is liberally scattered throughout the city, and so accessible, even if a wait, sometimes long, is involved for some of the main tourist attractions.
I was intent however on visiting the Spedale Degli Innocenti, the Foundling Hospital in Florence, construction of which started in 1419 and which continued as an orphanage until 1875.
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