ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of medicine’s coloniality, historically and into the present, developing an argument that such coloniality is mirrored in casual uses of the medical/health humanities (such as poetry) that fail to respect the necessity for disciplinary knowledge. Anchored in growing literatures about critical and translational health humanities, the chapter describes ways that poetry and poetic imaginations are currently deployed in the disciplines of medicine and medical education. Specifically, medical education may be at risk of accessorizing and fetishizing poetry and poets to buttress disciplinary power. The chapter concludes with a reimagining of poetry’s potential, arguing that if poetry were reckoned with seriously by medicine, and especially if particular poems, poets, and poetic traditions were accounted for with a seriousness granted to bioscientific epistemologies, medicine and medical education might well address some of its current colonial habits and crises. Throughout the chapter are woven Indigenous poetic voices that medical educators and practitioners may find useful in efforts to unsettle the longstanding colonial conceits of medicine.
