ABSTRACT
In this two-part chapter, we ask: ‘Why poetry in medicine and medical education? What’s the point? Why don’t we stick to instrumental biomedicine and clinical and communication skills’? Poetry has concerns beyond the instrumental, engaging aesthetic, ethical, political, and transcendental values. Biomedicine too should embrace such values, engaging with a language rich in productive metaphor to shape a medicine of qualities as well as quantities. In its contact with medicine, we call ‘for poetry itself to deepen its reach and possibility’. In the face of global issues such as the climate crisis, medicine is improving people’s lives. Why, then, tamper with how medical students and doctors are educated? This chapter calls for continuous quality improvement – we can always do better. More, current medical education can be seen to hamper the learning of a humane medicine. If poetry does anything, it produces a concentrate of medicine called ‘metaphors’. They are life enriching. This chapter urges that you treat the contents of the Handbook as medicinal, beginning with the health of the imagination. Our authors have collected a range of chapters to produce what the poet Yeats would have called ‘A Vision’. Let’s indulge such a Vision.
