A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine

Description

A Body of Work includes poems by writers from the dawn of Enlightenment to the 21st Century and explores changing attitudes to medicine, health and the body. The book is divided into eight thematic sections, each of which includes a chronological range of poetry and excerpts of important historical and contextual medical writing. The sections are: Body as machine Nerves, mind, and brain Consuming Illness, disease, and disability Treatment Hospitals, practitioners, and professionals Sex, evolution, and reproduction Ageing and dying Includes work by such poets as: Dannie Abse, Maya Angelou, Simon Armitage, Margaret Atwood, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, John Burnside, Raymond Carver, Lucille Clifton, S. T. Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Mark Doty, T.S. Eliot, Paul Farley, Ann Finch, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Graves, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ted Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Paul Muldoon, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, John Addington Symonds, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams.

Corinna Wagner is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Exeter, UK. She publishes on the history of medicine and visual culture, and is author of Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture (2013) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism (2016). Andy Brown is Senior Lecturer and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, UK. A widely published poet, novelist and critic, his books of poetry include Exurbia (2014), The Fool and the Physician (2012) and Goose Music (with John Burnside, 2008). His first novel is Apples & Prayers (2015).

Does A Body of Work contribute anything substantially new to this genre? The answer is a resounding yes ... [This is] not just an anthology of poems with the relevant subject matter ... but rather an exploration of the relationship between poems and medical beliefs at the time of their writing ... I strongly recommend A Body of Work to anyone interested in poetry about illness, or poetry and medicine, especially students of the health care professions and their teachers. * Medical Humanities blog * A Body of Work offers a unique perspective into the history of literature and medicine. Wagner and Brown have created a book that is certainly worth having within easy reach for its accessible engagement with some of the fundamental questions which have shaped contemporary understandings of bodily experience throughout history. * Centre for Medical Humanities online * This is a superb collection and I think a first. There are smaller anthologies such as Tools of the Trade but this dwarfs the others. I shall be recommending it widely in my lectures and seminars of the use of poetry in medical education both in the UK and Europe. * Dr Trevor G Stammers, St Mary's University, UK *