ABSTRACT
John Keats famously rejected medicine for poetry, in some way failing to see the poetry in medicine. We counter this view, starting again from the position that it is unwise to stereotype biomedicine as always reductive and somehow anti-poetry. We have shown how biomedicine is replete with metaphors (“white lung”, “hyperdense”, “hole in the heart”), while we have also warned against metaphor ossification and called for the coining of new metaphors and images in medicine. We call on the basic relational principle of Object-Oriented Ontology, that the quality of the stuff of the world is brought out through comparing one thing with another – the reflex of metaphor. Somewhat rebelliously, we consider how poetry can instrumentalise or profit from medicine. We bring forward T.S. Eliot’s distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom vis-à-vis biomedicine and humanistic medicine. We severely critique bad poetry in medical education circles, seeking to disrupt process-based instrumentalist approaches that fail to coin metaphors and see the “stoniness in the stone” (shadowing the close description of the clinical examination). We bring forward the work of practising poets to demonstrate the difference between fully realised creations and artless ones, again reminding those who would draw on medicine that a rich vocabulary and set of metaphors, images, ways of speaking and semiotics (signs and symbols) is staring them in the face. Through poetry, we suggest, medicine can, indeed, shift from a base in information and knowledge to realisation of kinds of wisdom.
