conversations about medicine and life
Dr Jacob Edmond
I coordinate a University of Otago English paper, ENGL131: Controversial Classics, which is an approved eighth paper for Health Science First Year. As I posted on the course Facebook page, ENGL131 fosters the skills that a recent report suggests are the best predictors of success in the health professions: critical thinking, analysis, and communication.
[Read more…] about Why studying Milton and Plath might make you a better doctor
Koenraad Kuiper
Doctor poet Frank Koenegracht is, as it says in his publicity, ‘one of the best, albeit not yet best-known, poets of the Dutch language area.’ For a day job he has been a psychiatrist specialising in sleep disorders.
He was born in Rotterdam in 1945 and has published ten volumes of poetry all with De Bezige Bei (The Busy Bee). He has received two prizes for his work: in 1990 the Anna Blaman Prize an in 2001 the Frans Erens Prize for his collective work.
His poetry often employs a vernacular style and picks up pop music allusions, has flashes of humour but is seriously involved with the human condition.
Dr Lesley Morrison
On the bookmark inside Tools of the Trade, a little pocket book of poems for new doctors, is a poem by the doctor poet Gael Turnbull, ‘Lines for a Bookmark’:
You who read..
May you seek
As you look;
May you keep
What you need;
May you care
What you choose;
And know here
In this book
Something strange,
Something sure,
That will change
You and be yours.
This was and is very much our aspiration for this project, to enhance the experience of being a new doctor, and to provide a comforting, supporting and illuminating friend.
Liz Breslin
Some people process the world through paycheques, others through the haircuts on their neighbours, or the shoes they look down at or the latest thing the Internet says. As a writer I process relentlessly through words and words and words.
So when my grandmother, on the other side of the world, started her decline into Alzheimer’s, it was her language, or rather, the sudden and marked change in it, that drew me in to the pathos of her story. She’d grown up speaking Polish, using English as a second language and England as a refuge at the conclusion of the Second World War. Her English disappeared first, fast. Her Polish came forth, lingered.
[Read more…] about Poetry and memory: Alzheimer’s and a spoon
Ruth Arnison
Spring, summer, autumn, winter: four times a year Ruth Arnison distributes 8000 brightly-coloured cards to medical waiting rooms, hospices, rest homes and prisons throughout most of New Zealand. She is the founder and editor of the Dunedin-based charity Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ). But why place poetry in a waiting room? People hatee poetry, right? Wrong. The poetry cards have proved extremely popular. Arnison once received an email which sums up why: Although I am not a person who gravitates toward poetry, after I read the selection of poems, I noticed I had been given an oasis from anxiety and had been briefly removed from our present situation.
How can a poem—a few words strung together on a few lines—be an oasis? Ruth Arnison explains: [Read more…] about An oasis from anxiety
At the age of nine, Jamie Trower suffered a traumatic brain injury. He spent months in a coma, and two subsequent years living in the Wilson Centre in Auckland undergoing rehabilitation. In 2015 he published Anatomy, a powerful collection of poetry which chronicles his changed life. Jamie explains how entering the ‘separate cosmos’ of poetry helped him find a way home to himself. [Read more…] about Muses and marble
