medical humanities

“First do no harm”: Poetry & Medicine

Poetry

By Christy Tidwell

As I observed in last week’s National Poetry Month post, both poetry and science provide us with new ways to see the world we live in. This week, I want to get more specific and consider one STEM field with a significant relationship to poetry: medicine.

Poets Imagining Doctors

There is a long history of poetry representing doctors and medicine. Robert Southey’s “The Surgeon’s Warning” (1796) provides one Gothic and rather gruesome vision of doctors (thanks to Laura Kremmel for the recommendation!). In it, a doctor on his deathbed worries about how his corpse will be treated:

All kinds of carcasses I have cut up,
        And the judgment now must be–
    But brothers I took care of you,
        So pray take care of me!

    I have made candles of infants fat
        The Sextons have been my slaves,
    I have bottled babes unborn, and dried
        Hearts and livers from rifled graves.

    And my Prentices now will surely come
        And carve me bone from bone,
    And I who have rifled the dead man’s grave
        Shall never have rest in my own.

This is an image of the doctor as monster, as one who perhaps deserves to receive the treatment he’s given others’ corpses (ultimately, “they carv’d him bone from bone”), and it reflects 18th century fears of doctors and surgeons themselves as well as those who worked alongside them (graverobbers, for instance).

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Scared Sick: What the Medical Humanities Owes the Gothic

Events
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On Tuesday, March 16, 2021, at 11 am (Mountain time), Dr. Laura Kremmel will present a Brown Bag on the Medical Humanities and the Gothic. This free presentation will be held via Zoom, and more information is available on the SDSM&T Humanities & Social Sciences Facebook page.

In the twentieth century, medicine became an institution: a complex system of technology, finance, and liability. Out of this century, we get White Coat Syndrome (fear of hospitals and doctors), tales of surgical conspiracies, isolating and invasive treatments, and economic systems determined to banish humanity from the art of healing. Unlike the hackneyed anatomists of the eighteenth century or the reformer physicians of the nineteenth century, twentieth-century doctors, surgeons, and nurses become small actors in a system that manages them, one that can simultaneously feel like a living, breathing creature and a cold, impenetrable structure. The field of Medical Humanities arose out of these developments, at least partially out of fear.

In this presentation, Dr. Kremmel shares some work in progress on the contentious relationship between the Medical Humanities and the Gothic/Horror tradition. The first part will include what the Medical Humanities is and why it’s important. The second part will include a closer look at Gothic interpretations of such topics as systemic/independent medical practice, organ harvesting, disease and contagion.