ABSTRACT
This introduction provides an overview of the edited collection, placing the work in historical and pedagogical contexts. A root author and root metaphor are identified, where the Canadian physician EP Scarlett (from 1936) suggests, ‘A physician should be a kind of poet’. The metaphorical window is provided by the phrase ‘a kind of poet’, inviting us to see poetry and poets as placed on a wide spectrum of types and products. We enter the linked houses of medicine and poetry through this window, rather than the conventional front door, as slantwise observers of a tradition in which expert clinical and poetic practices share intensive production of metaphor. We note that medicine without an awareness of metaphor is zombie medicine – functional or instrumental, as the evidence-based application of reductive biomedicine. There is no escape from metaphor. But, of course, medicine is more than this – it is a culturally and historically-specific practice going beyond the instrumental to embrace ethical, aesthetic, political, and transcendental values. Every one of our authors, as we summarize in this chapter, has grappled deeply with such enriching translations from the literal to the metaphorical, to create a stimulating and controversial collection of essays re-defining relationships between medical cultures, clinical practices, medical education, and poetry.
