Humanities resources to support healthcare professionals and patients
from Ward 64, by Sarah Broom. there is poetry all over the walls of oncology and I want to get out Extract from Ward 64. Read the whole poem (Scottish Poetry Library website) Commentary Sarah Broom was a New Zealand poet who found she had lung cancer when pregnant with her third child in 2008. Read More …
Storyhealing, by Gavin Francis. The weight of clinical practice can be overwhelming for some – that’s why more doctors in the West are working part-time and retiring earlier than ever before. But the profession’s very multiplicity offers insights and inspirations, satisfactions and consolations, available in few other others. I’m now 20 years into my medical Read More …
Sally Wilson: My postpartum psychosis. Grateful for ECT. Nina McCallig: grateful for being sectioned. I saw a midwife take Ella away, I believed they were taking her to be resuscitated because I’d harmed her. I was convinced that because I’d hurt my baby I had died and was now living in the ‘after life’, a Read More …
On working in the NHS as a nurse, Molly Case. Commentary Molly Case was a student nurse when she recorded this, but before that, already a poet and performer. Here she was invited to speak at the RCN annual meeting. There is an alternative YouTube video of the same piece set in hospital. Further info Read More …
Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1546. Commentary The Fountain of Youth has the magical property of restoring the health and looks of those who bathe in it. Legend lists a number of such places. While we may not be looking for quite this now, belief in the healing properties of bathing has never disappeared. It is Read More …
Dubois placed me upon the Mattress, & spread a cambric handkerchief upon my face. It was transparent, however, & I saw, through it, that the Bed stead was instantly surrounded by the 7 men & my nurse. I refused to be held; but when, Bright through the cambric, I saw the glitter of polished Steel Read More …
Forty-eight days ago I qualified ‘with distinction’; but distinction is one thing and hernia is another. Once I watched a professor operating on a strangulated hernia. He did it, while I sat in the amphitheatre. Suppose they bring me a hernia? Worse, they brought a dreadfully injured young girl, only daughter of a devastated widower. Read More …
Lithotomy – and hence, the lithotomy position. Commentary French composer Martin Marais (1656-28) wrote this dramatic, narrated piece about the experience of this terrifying, high-risk, no-anaesthetic operation in the 17th century. The approach was trans-perineal. Samuel Pepys had a bladder stone removed this way when he was 25 in 1658, repeatedly mentioned in his diaries, including Read More …