poems/arts in medicine

This article foregrounds Judy Grahn's commitment to social justice and chiefly considers her nine-part poems: "A Woman is Talking to Death" and "Mental." These poems illuminate the socially constructed nature of mental illness and challenge readers to consider how and why the characters within them are deemed mentally ill. Little, if any, scholarship has been devoted to using Grahn's poetry, and particularly "Mental," as a framework for analyzing the pathologization of people, especially women, relative to the system of mental health...

We introduce three of our interactive artworks that translate text into artificial creatures or creatures into text by means of user interaction. These installations make use of experimental literature, media archaeology, surrealism, artificial life, and algorithmic methods.

Although the discipline of anthropology has much to contribute to the understanding of the nature and experience of aging, it is a relative latecomer to gerontology. After briefly discussing why this is the case, the authors discuss the contributions of two anthropologists who brought a substantive anthropological voice to gerontological discussion of aging. Examining the "ancestral roots" of the anthropology of aging, we spotlight the intellectual heritage of Margaret Clark, arguably the "mother" of this anthropological subfield, and that of Sharon Kaufman, her student, colleague, and a pioneer in her own right...

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Poems are essential in art and vital organs in literature. Similarly, surgery (and neurosurgery) is also regarded to be an art in medicine. From Hippocrates to nowadays, there is a debate on whether medicine -especially surgery- is a kind of an art or a field of science or a combination of both. This close relation becomes clearer during the practice of surgery, especially in neurosurgery. Herein, the relation between Turkish poetry and Turkish neurosurgery is being presented by researching the interesting and exciting stories about three poets (Can Yücel, Hasan Hüseyin Korkmazgil, Nazım Hikmet), their poems; and two Turkish neurosurgeons (Gazi Yaşargil, Yücel Kanpolat)...

The personhood movement in dementia research has established the theoretical foundation for implementing cultural arts interventions in care practices. The underlying assumption is that professionals from the visual and the performance arts are well equipped to see the person behind the condition and to focus on possibilities for meaningful relationships in the here and now. This article focuses on poetry interventions as one example of cultural arts interventions. The use of poetry might seem counterintuitive, given that people with dementia lose their language abilities and that poetry is regarded to be the most complex literary form...

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Inclusion of the humanities in undergraduate medicine curricula remains controversial. Skeptics have placed the burden of proof of effectiveness upon the shoulders of advocates, but this may lead to pursuing measurement of the immeasurable, deflecting attention away from the more pressing task of defining what we mean by the humanities in medicine. While humanities input can offer a fundamental critical counterweight to a potentially reductive biomedical science education, a new wave of thinking suggests that the kinds of arts and humanities currently used in medical education are neither radical nor critical enough to have a deep effect on students' learning and may need to be reformulated...

The year 2015 marks the 750th birth anniversary of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). It is less known that Dante had a sound level of medical knowledge, probably derived by his academic studies. In his works, medieval notions of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology (e.g. the connection between brain and spinal cord, function of optic nerve and peripheral nerves, knowledge of vegetative nervous system) and descriptions of neurological disorders (e.g. epileptic seizures, effects on nervous system by metal intoxication, and narcolepsy) may be found, specially in the Inferno, the first part of his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy...

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'Many professional scientists over the years have expressed their thoughts and ideas in poetry.'

Rural family medicine residencies and practices continue to have difficulty attracting applicants and practitioners. Students facing decisions about rural training or practice may be deterred by negative stereotypes or a lack of understanding about rural experience. Renewed efforts to foster students' interest and influence students' intent toward rural practice are sorely needed. The authors report one such innovative strategy that used literary sources, many written by rural physicians, to trigger discussion and reflection among a group of 11 medical students who volunteered in 2004 to participate in a two-day retreat sponsored by The Ohio State University College of Medicine Rural Health Scholars program...

OBJECTIVES: To determine how often Shakespeare's characters faint, fit, or die from extreme emotion; to assess Shakespeare's uniqueness in this regard; and to examine the plausibility of these dramatised events. DESIGN: Line by line search through modern editions of these late 16th and early 17th century works for accounts of characters fainting, fitting, or dying while under strong emotion and for no other apparent reason. DATA SOURCES: All 39 canonical plays by Shakespeare and his three long narrative poems; 18 similar works by seven of Shakespeare's best known contemporaries...

Robert Burns's poem, Death and Doctor Hornbook, 1785, tells of the drunken narrator's late night encounter with Death. The Grim Reaper is annoyed that ‘Dr Hornbook’, a local schoolteacher who has taken to selling medications and giving medical advice, is successfully thwarting his efforts to gather victims. The poet fears that the local gravedigger will be unemployed but Death reassures him that this will not be the case since Hornbook kills more than he cures. Previous commentators have regarded the poem as a simple satire on amateur doctoring...

This research was designed to test the hypothesis that Milton's poem Paradise Lost is meaningfully patterned with respect to sound. Thirty-six segments from 12 Books of Paradise Lost were scored (Whissell, 2000) in terms of their proportional use of Pleasant, Cheerful, Active, Nasty, Unpleasant, Sad, Passive, and Soft sounds. Paradise Lost includes more Active, Nasty, and Unpleasant sounds and fewer Pleasant, Passive, Soft, and Sad sounds than a representative sample of anthologized poetry. The way in which emotional sounds are patterned (e...

This review considers novels, plays and poems dealing with movement disorders in order to show the relevance in the literary context. The motifs are arranged and compared following a modern neurological nosology according to Parkinson syndromes, dystonia, myoclonus, tics, hemifacial spasm, Tourette syndrome, Huntington's disease and hyperekplexia. There is considerable variety in how movement disorders are depicted and how much influence they have on the plot structures. Their usage ranges from a brief reference in order to accentuate aspects of a character's personality or social position, such as in Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy or Galdós; to truly constituting one of the plot's main themes as, for example, with the representation of Lewy body disease in Franzen's The Corrections and Huntington's disease in Vonnegut's Galápagos, Sawyer's Frameshift or McEwan's Saturday...

OBJECTIVE: To find out if Shakespeare, famed for his insights into human nature, is exceptional in how much his characters express grief through somatic symptoms and signs, and by physical illness. METHODS: The texts of all large-scale works currently attributed to Shakespeare (39 plays, 3 long narrative poems) were systematically searched for bodily changes and for evidence of grief as dominating the character's emotional state at the time. The findings were compared with those from a search of 46 works, similar in genre, by 15 prominent playwrights active at the same time as Shakespeare...

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