Alan Roddick
The only poem I have ever written directly about dentistry is called “A Patient”. When I wrote it, some fifty years ago, James Kirkup’s “A Correct Compassion” was the only example I knew of a poem ‘about’ medicine. It is both a vivid description of a cardiac surgeon, observed by medical students, performing a mitral stenosis valvotomy, and an extended metaphor for the writing of a poem.
At the end of the operation (and the end of the poem), the surgeon’s ‘“I do not stitch up the pericardium. // It is not necessary.’” is matched by the poet’s conclusion:
For this is imagination’s other place, / Where only necessary things are done.”
The occasion of my own poem was less dramatic, but I like to think it demonstrates that a dental extraction, another occasion where ‘only necessary things are done’, can make a fitting subject for a poem.
The idea of retreating from the world in search of health is alive and well today. People imagine that holidays from everyday routine will renew their health and vigor, and specialised retreats, involving meditation and yoga, offer a more introspective way of achieving health. As 
In the corner of my office, I have a sculpture on loan from artist Mike O’Kane. It confronts me every day with a wonderful juxtaposition of the themes of my work in neuroscience: how the brain works, and the personal experience of conditions that strike to the sense of self and the equilibrium of mood and emotion. An extremely prevalent example is anxiety disorder. Many of us have either personally experienced this, or know of someone who has.
