ABSTRACT
We address the thorny issue of the “application” of poetry to “improve” medicine in confounding notions of “improvement”. We recognise that poems can as easily confuse and terrorise as relax, enlighten, and beautify. We cannot take poems for granted. This again implies that in the meeting of poetry and medicine there is labour afoot, groundwork and preparation. It helps, we think, to identify a common diction between medicine and poetry such as sound, voice, metaphor, symbolism, and ambiguity, and work from there. Poetry certainly brings us into relationship with a field of activity, just as the clinic or operating theatre may do in medicine and surgery. Also, structures of medicine and poetry share movement between a “backstage” and “frontstage” in terms of scripts and performances. We argue that “adaptive expertise” rests with the quality of movement between backstage and the rehearsed, and frontstage and the improvised. We show how poems illustrate this organisation of space and the dynamics of inhabiting it. Poetry for nothing but itself suddenly offers liberation from expectation and revelation of meaning. Where the experience was had but meaning was missing, now there is insight or revelation of sorts. We see also that we were seeking cognitive insights where poetry was offering massive shifts in affect and values. Medicine must grasp its aesthetic and ethical (as well as its political) responsibilities to build on its massive material benefits. We challenge the habit to see poetry as a means to an end, such as its therapeutic use, at the same time as we prompt the kindling of poetic gestures among medical students. In this, we build what we call a “Lyrical Medicine”.
