Poetry and medicine may not seem a natural combination, but they've been interlinked since the time of Hippocrates, who was a poet as well as a doctor. Today, there's an increasing focus on the benefits of poetry in healthcare settings - for both patients and professionals. Take a look at some of our links below to find out more, or read our blog post here.
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The Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology
An anthology of poems selected to help anyone living with stress, depression and other anxieties. Arranged by spiritual ailment, the sections include a range of verse, new and old, which may be of comfort to those in need of a pick-me-up for the soul.
The Poetry Cure
'When we're ill we're forced to recognise that we've become another person - unfamiliar, frail and mortal. The adjustment is painful and it's well-nigh impossible to find the words to describe how alien our sick self seems. These poems magically supply the images and emotions that help us to accept our inexpressible vulnerability.' – Dr Miriam Stoppard
Tools of the Trade: Poems for New Doctors
Given to all medical students graduating in Scotland since 2014, 'Tools of the Trade' is a pocket-sized anthology of around 50 poems, intended to aid reflection on compassion and personal resilience in the challenging situations faced by all junior doctors.
The Poetry Pharmacy: Tried-and-True Prescriptions for the Heart, Mind and Soul
As heard on BBC Radio 4, the essential prescriptions from William Sieghart's poetic dispensary. These poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice offer comfort, delight and inspiration for all; a space for reflection, and a chance to realise - I'm not the only one who feels like this.
Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy
These essential poems are all about being human, being alive and staying alive: about love and loss; fear and longing; hurt and wonder; war and death; grief and suffering; birth, growing up and family; time, ageing and mortality; memory, self and identity; faith, hope and belief; acceptance of inadequacy and making do...all of human life in a hundred highly individual, universal poems.
Ourselves
“Beda Higgins’ debut collection is pulsing with life. These accomplished poems of hospital wards, loss and the compensations of love are told with clear-sightedness and compassion. Partly inspired by a career in nursing, ‘Ourselves’ brings us the everyday in all its enormity, mundanity and beauty in poems that will resonate widely.” - Anna Woodford
Swollening
Part poetic experiment and part memoir, Swollening attempts to diagnose what has been undiagnosable, tracing an uneven path from a lifetime of swallowing bad feelings—homophobia in its external and internalized manifestations, heteronormativity, anxiety surrounding desire, aversion to sex—to a body in revolt.
Every Little Sound (e-book)
Ruby Robinson's debut draws from neuroscience on the idea of 'internal gain', an internal volume control which helps us amplify and focus on quiet sounds in times of threat, danger or intense concentration. Her poems invite us to listen carefully, and use ideas of hearing and listening to explore the legacies of trauma. The book celebrates the separateness and connectedness of human experience in relationships, and our capacity to harm and love.
Please Hear What I'm Not Saying
With over 600 submissions, poets from around the world put their pens to paper to create this anthology, enthused by a common goal to raise money for the charity Mind. With poems focusing on mental health from a wide range of experiences, this book aims to continue the worldwide conversation about mental health.
Of Mutability
In a series that explores the nature of change - in the body and the natural world, and in the shifting relationships between people - these poems look freshly but squarely at mortality. By turns grave and playful, arresting and witty, the poems in Of Mutability celebrate each waking moment as though it might be the last, and in so doing restore wonder to the smallest of encounters.
Sudden Collapses in Public Places
"Anyone who has ever spent any time in a hospital or in a hospital waiting room will love these poems, anyone who has ever been to the doctor or felt ill or had to fill in a form will love these poems. That covers everyone." -
Jackie Kay
Don't Bring Me No Rocking Chair: Poems on Ageing
Poetry can help to give us a fresh language to think about ageing and these poems are chosen to fortify, celebrate, lament, grieve, rage and ridicule. Ageing is not a single phenomenon but complex, multiple, perplexing: experienced historically as well as individually. This anthology may not console but it can widen our perspectives, helping us to change what we can change: our attitudes.
Milk and Honey
Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival, the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. It takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them.
Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back
This groundbreaking anthology examines the poetics of disabled and D/deaf cultures. The first of its kind and packed with fierce poetry, essays, photos and links to accessible online videos, it showcases a diversity of styles, opinions, and survival strategies.
Poetry and Medicine
- Julia Darling
The concept that poetry can help cure us by giving us words to help find order in the chaos of ill health is the legacy of Julia Darling. She passionately believed that ‘poetry should be part of every modern hospital’. - The Emergency Poet
Deborah Alma, or the Emergency Poet, fully subscribes to the concept of poetry as therapy and has been dispensing poems for many years, first from the back of her vintage ambulance and now from the world's first dedicated Poetry Pharmacy. - Poetry Remedy
Former Nurse-Verse to the Emergency Poet, Sue Spencer uses poetry to facilitate well-being in education and health care. As Assistant Editor to the BMJ Humanities, she believes that poetry can bolster people through challenging times. During her time teaching here at Newcastle University, the Library facilitated popular events where Sue offered poetry remedies following a personal exchange.
Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine
Currently on hiatus, the Hippocrates Prize is an international poetry prize exploring the relations between poetry and medicine.
Medicine in Poetry
- Danielle OfriDanielle Ofri, MD, PhD, is one of the foremost voices in the medical world today, shining an unflinching light on the realities of healthcare and speaking passionately about the doctor-patient relationship.
She writes about medicine and the doctor-patient connection. Her writing has appears frequently in the New York Times, as well as in The New Yorker, Slate Magazine, the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and other publications.
Danielle is a founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review, the first literary journal to arise from a medical setting.
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