POETRY FOR MEDICINE AND HEALTHCARE


 Schoolboys have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.¹

Aristophanes


 Look around – there’s only one thing of danger for you here – poetry.²
 (interrogated at gunpoint on his deathbed, when his house was raided)

Pablo Neruda


 If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.³

Emily Dickinson


 ‘When Nehru lay dying, he had written out the last verse of Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening on a piece of paper by his bed, and kept repeating the lines (‘And miles to go before I sleep…’).⁴

Neil Astley


 Poetry should be part of every modern hospital... It’s a powerful force, which can help us through the darkest times. I would like to see more poets in residence, more poetry books in waiting rooms, more poems on the walls, more training in creative writing for doctors, and more poems printed on primary care leaflets.⁵

Julia Darling

Gillie Bolton

15C Bury Place, Bloomsbury, London WC1A 2JB, UK; gillie@gilliebolton.com

DOCTORS' POEMS, ARISTOTLE'S POETICS


 Let not young souls be smothered out before
 They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
 It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull….⁶


Remembering that all healthcare staff are, and are allowed to be, emotional people is critical amid current upheavals in their education and governance. Some of those with whom we work would have been happy in Plato’s Republic. Plato banned most poetry from his …