Chris Ellis is a general practitioner in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He was previously associate professor of family medicine at the University of the United Arab Emirates and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Much to my surprise I am about to have published a second anthology of poetry. These anthologies are collections of free verse poems that have arisen from my medical practice over about forty to fifty years. I average about five poems a year. This is not exactly speed writing.
I use them unashamedly and without the least immodest embarrassment in teaching family medicine to the students, who have no say in the matter as they are my captive audience. I like to think of it as enlightened coercive teaching while ignoring the rights based ethics of the curriculum.
They can each choose one poem from the anthology that they like or that resonates with their experience (I gamble that surely there must be one that they like) and then we discuss what my experience was at the time of writing.
As you can image most of the students are more interested in the patient’s glomerular filtration rate and LDL measurements but there are usually a couple of students who start the ball rolling and connect with the experiences in the words.
William Wordsworth, when he was poet laureate, said he wrote poems “to console the afflicted and teach the young and gracious of every age to see, to think and to feel.”
“Listen to the presences inside of poems” wrote the Sufi Mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, “let them take you where you will” and then we start some form of group conversation and follow where the words take us. Sometimes it is a damp squib that hardly gets off the ground while at other times it all gets ripped apart.
There is a long history to this. Apollo was the original god of both medicine and poetry as medicine and poetry are both concerned with the understanding and improvement of the human experience. In this spirit William Wordsworth, when he was poet laureate, said he wrote poems “to console the afflicted and teach the young and gracious of every age to see, to think and to feel.”1
There is also this therapeutic component to the poetry, which we discuss. The Greek philosopher Plato taught that beautiful language could induce sophrosyné, which has no exact English equivalent but may be roughly translated as a condition of stability and integration in a stressed and anxious life. Poetry, as the poetry therapist John Fox said, may be a “…companion in the dark”.
The power that this poetic language can have in teaching is often in the endings that provide moral or philosophical reflections on illness which is the “kicker” or message that you want to leave with the student. There is now an extensive literature and choice of poems to use in teaching medicine. They are mostly used as ways of emphasizing human nature and illness experiences. The teacher can almost always find a poem, from tuberculosis right through to depression, that is relevant to the clinical subject under discussion and can start the session under a title such as “Poem of The Day” or on the first power point. A short background of the author or other psychosocial information can then be given that helps integrate medical humanities into illness and disease management.
To give a well known example when discussing end of life care or the management of dementia I may start with Seamus Heaney as Poet of The Day, with a poem such as The Follower.
We begin with a poem such as this one and then reflect back on it at the end of the session. The poem can then help integrate our personal experiences and shared humanity with the illness and its management.
Sometime in the distant past I must have decided to try and combine art with the poems. As Ben Johnson once said, “… poetry is a speaking picture, and picture a mute poetry…”. As I cannot draw or paint myself I managed to persuade a medical colleague who paints in water colours to illustrate some of the poems. I gave him the first collection and told him there was no hurry. This was my first mistake.
After six months I phoned him and solicitously enquired whether he had had a look at them. Yes, he had and he really liked them but needed some more time.
The poem can then help integrate our personal experiences and shared humanity with the illness and its management.
I like to work with people who are artistic and unconventional so I left it for a year and phoned him again. No, he said, he could not do it. The poems resonated with him and he could see exactly what I was saying and identified completely with them. Nevertheless did I not realise, he said, that to convert the words into shapes and colours-putting emotions and words into visual forms- was not easy and needed a deep imaginative interpretation. I said that I quite understood the difficulty of translating between the two mediums and we left it at that and I went back to my routine life of treating acne and ingrowing toenails.
Six weeks later he phoned me and said they were done. To say that they were illuminating in their visual introspection and beauty would be an understatement. I was transfixed, and still am, by the duality between the words and images that he had captured.
To give the reader an example is one poem I wrote to illustrate agenda dissonance in doctor-patient relationships.
ALCOHOLIC MANIPULATIONS
Did I smell
a slight whiff of foetor hepaticus?
There’s a small burn mark on his jacket.
We have a gentleman’s agreement,
not to talk about his drinking,
although that’s his agreement not mine.
Have I been conned again?
He’s such a nice man.
I haven’t wanted to offend him.
I do make enquiries
in subtle and oblique ways.
He brushes them aside with
the ease of a batsman
glancing them down the leg side.
That I should even suggest it, hurts him terribly,
as though I have dropped in his estimation.
How could I think such a thing
after all our silent agreements.
Long ago, almost at the first consultation,
he laid the foundation of how the game was to be played.
My moves were anticipated and diverted.
I was inexperienced then and must have acquiesced
on the days when I was tired.
He really must go into hospital now.
No, that’s not possible.
There’s a repetition of old excuses and familiar scripts.
He’s dehydrated.
I’m running late.
He just wants something for the vomiting.
I have often wondered why I write these poems and recently I found the word for it. It is autotelic. This roughly means that it is a reward in itself. The telos (or vision within oneself) acts almost as a displacement activity or outlet that needs a release for the writer. The reward takes place in the telling. The second and greatest pleasure, for myself, is the acceptance and help that I hope they may give to the reader.
Reference
- https://search.worldcat.org/title/Letter-from-William-Wordsworth-Coleorton-to-Lady-Beaumont-1807-May-21-:-autograph-manuscript-signed/oclc/983205387 [accessed 18/7/25]
Featured image by Dmitry Ratushny at Unsplash
Well done and huge congratulations on the second anthology, Chris!