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Arts

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Space-Dreaming in Lambeth

To commemorate 'Composed upon Westminster Bridge,' (3rd September 1802), Dave Mummery shares a Lambeth reverie with suggestions for musical accompaniment.
3 September 2025
4 mins read
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A Poem : Beyond The Extra Mile.

A poem for the beleaguered, the determined or the stubborn amongst us, who go to work each day and just do the best we can. Rest assured, despite the clamour and noise of unmet expectation, it is enough.
28 August 2025
1 min read
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Ulysses and the GP consultation

"Would I recommend Ulysses to a GP colleague? As a challenging read and a slow antidote to the nature of our rapid and fragmented working days; and maybe to serve as a reminder of how much goes unspoken during those precious 15
25 August 2025
1 min read
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How to use a stethoscope

Listen. Through me, you’ll hear the lub-dub of a beating heart, the heave of a heavy spirit, whisperings and murmurs of a broken life. Poetry by Emer Forde
19 August 2025
1 min read
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The Waiting Room

"I go into the waiting room for the next patient I am too see. So many sit there staring, yet not all are waiting for me." – Poem by Giles Dawney
13 August 2025
1 min read
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Samples (poem)

Our patients leave the room yet now some of them left behind. To be taken elsewhere, a fraction of body now extracted from mind.
22 July 2025
1 min read
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A poem: Heart failure.

Using a narrative based approach can also enrich our own perspective and give us boldness to hold back from encasing patients in the tight algorithms that chronic disease management is often associated with. Becca Quinn offers a reframing poem.
16 July 2025
1 min read
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I knew her smile…

A knock on the door. First patient of the day. “Hello… come in,” I say. I didn’t recognise the name, But I knew her smile. A poem by Rahhiel Riasat
26 June 2025
2 mins read
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Madness of Sense and the Sense of Madness

A reflection on the madness of sense and the sense of madness. Anuj Sean Chathley captures the demoralising and costly effects of healthcare funding cuts in poetry. "...these changes do not save. They spend — time, money, morale, and sense."
18 June 2025
2 mins read
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The Clock Ticks Differently Now

We competed not for praise, but for endurance. For the longest call. The bloodiest shift. The boldest procedure. A hundred hours a week? A badge of honour. In those halls, medicine was not a career. It was a covenant. Poem by Anuj
5 June 2025
1 min read
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Unfurling

Not the landlocked, shuffling prison. Even acid-green woggled she’s beautiful in the water, looser. Untangled. A poem.
15 April 2025
1 min read
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Fight or Flight

‘Trauma is patient, doc, if it's one thing I've learnt.’ His pale green eyes fix on mine dark pupils with an infinity of space. A poem by Giles Dawnay
10 April 2025
1 min read
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Clocks

"Something's gotta get me 
I guess, her elder wisdom smiles. Digging for one thing,
 we unearthed another." A poem by Giles Dawnay
12 March 2025
1 min read
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Systems Update (A poem)

In the hope that we can reflect on not losing the foundations of medicine, but also hold with conviction the new tools that we have been given with which to help and to heal.
29 January 2025
1 min read
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Narrative medicine

A means by which participants can make some sense of their threads... And nurse the ends of their unravelled stories. The healing ...Is in the weaving.
21 January 2025
1 min read
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Poems of hope, beauty, and friendship

In John Walker Smith's poetry the reader is drawn into the narrative through his conversational approach which permeates the prose.He aims to speak to the reader and offers avenues for reflection, providing comfort and counsel.
18 January 2025
1 min read
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Crab Apples

Giles Dawnay captures the transition of autumn to winter in a poem about cancer.
16 December 2024
1 min read
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For Who Do You Serve?

For my attention is elsewhere... Occupied by a mere digital abstraction... The computer between us acting as a physical metaphor... A poem by Callum Leese
28 November 2024
1 min read

Family values: reflections on heritage at the 60th Venice Biennale

The 60th Venice Biennale hidden among the palazzi, churches, and gardens of this beautiful city reflects what is means to be ‘Foreign’. With a global backdrop of multifarious crises concerning movement across countries, nations, territories, and borders, this would seem a pertinent
9 August 2024
3 mins read
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Post Heart Attack Review (poem)

Can't sleep unless I've had a skinful... his ruddy face flickers. Oscillating fast... between the big man not allowed to cry... and the little boy who chose to survive.
14 June 2024
1 min read
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At the National Theatre: Nye

I found this an inspiring, uplifting play about one of my heroes – the Welsh firebrand and father of the NHS, Aneurin “Nye” Bevan – vividly brought to life by another Welsh hero, the actor Michael Sheen.
21 March 2024
2 mins read
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Believing our own tinctures

...cognitive bias sustained public faith in the medical profession long before doctors had the tools to truly alter the course of an illness. These forces did not disappear the moment that working therapeutics arrived - meaning we remain enthralled by own salves
24 February 2024
2 mins read
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Jean Baudrillard against the Post Office

Over 4 million people watched the first episode of Mr Bates against the Post Office when it screened on New Year’s Day. And suddenly things started to happen. David Misselbrook reflects on what this might mean for British medicine...
10 January 2024
2 mins read
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