Literature and Medicine

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Clinical Medicine 2012, Vol 12, No 1: 92–3 Literature and medicine

The Iatroversalia (Doctor Coles, his junior colleague in both medi- children´s hospital, as he blew the whistle Poems) of William Carlos cine and literature, who had met on corrupted managerial practices, also Williamsa Williams at a stage where the acclaimed played a significant part in his return to author of the epic poem Paterson and of New Jersey.4 Pictures from Brueghel had been forced For Williams, medicine and poetry into retirement following a series of worked in symbiosis. Thanks to poetry, This column explores the links and strokes. The doctor stories Coles collected he was able to transform medical jargon synergies between medicine and combine invaluable autobiographical into a more comprehensible narrative. literature. What roles can literature play accounts and insights into Williams’ On the other hand, medicine helped him in reflecting and influencing good medical practice, stories of quality set his priorities straight and prevented a practice, and what sorts of images of unparalleled since those of Anton detachment from reality, thus making doctoring are to be found in drama, Chekhov, such as The use of force, The concision and objectivity the hallmarks poetry, fiction, biography, electoronic insane, and Old doc rivers, as well as some of a personal poetic style, epitomised in fora and film? The editors would be of the best poems written by a doctor, his most famous recurrent line: ‘no ideas pleased to receive short papers including Dead baby, A cold front or Le but in things’,3,5 a style reflected in his between 500 and 1,000 words on Médecin Malgré Lui.2 doctor poems The mental hospital garden relevant topics. Those interested in Under the early influence of Whitman and in Between walls: contributing should and especially Keats, his first book, email [email protected] or ‘The back wings/ of the// hospital where/ Poems, was published in 1909 at his own [email protected] nothing// will grow lie/ cinders// in which expense, a volume that in revisions of shine/ the broken// pieces of a green/ bottle’.5 his oeuvre he would later exclude, con- To the frequently asked question ‘How sidering it an immature and poor The poem Histology is another example was he able to manage two full-time replica of Keats’s Endymion. Along with of his use of an American idiom and the careers so well and for so long?’,the physi- Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolitle, both of variable foot as two essential ways of cian–writer, William Carlos Williams whom he met at Pennsylvania State poetic expression: ‘There is/ the/ micro- (Rutherford, New Jersey, 1883 – 1963), University, Williams briefly embraced scopic/ anatomy// of/ the whale/ this is/ 6 used to reply that it was no strain since: the modernist, anti-romantic move- reassuring.’ ments Imagism and Vorticism,onlyto Medicine also left behind Williams’s ‘they are two parts of a whole, that it is not distance himself soon after from his creative ego by putting things into per- two jobs at all, that one rests the man when fellow (and otherwise fulltime) writers, spective: ‘there´s nothing like a difficult 1 the other fatigues him’. in order to focus on the everyday life of patient to show us ourselves’.1 Williams was indeed an extremely busy people dying or giving birth, working or In The yellow flower he asks: obstetrician and paediatrician practising in unemployed in the industrial land- ‘What shall I say, because talk I must?/ That his hometown during and after the time of scapes of the Passaic River, from where I have found a cure/ for the sick?/ I have the Great Depression. He also became a his poetry emanates. found no cure/ for the sick/ but this crooked well known American storyteller and one Unlike other contemporary American flower/ which only to look upon/ all men/ of the greatest American poets. poets such as TS Elliot and Ezra Pound, are cured.’6 His classic The doctor stories is a com- who flew to Europe in search of inspira- In his roles as paediatrician and obstetri- pilation of writings gathered by Robert tion at the time, Williams settled down in Rutherford. Having travelled and lived in cian, Williams was dedicated to the Europe during some of his high school healthcare of his neighbours and helped Ivan Iniesta, consultant neurologist and postgraduate years, Williams was to to deliver as many babies as poems (The The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust, remain in his birthplace and boyhood birth among them). As John Berryman Liverpool town for the remainder of his life, once wrote in his elegy: believing that the universal is the partic- ‘At dawn you rose and wrote—the books aThe team ‘iatroversalia’ was coined by the spanish physician-poet Pascual Iniesta ular without boundaries and that ‘any- poured forth—/ you delivered infinite 3 (1908–1999) meaning poetry inspired by or where is everywhere’. His abrupt resig- babies, in one great birth—/ and your gen- related to medical practice. nation from the New York nursery and erosity/ to juniors made you deeply loved,

Literature and medicine

deeply:/ if envy was a Henry trademark, he nothing more than a boil on his back is so 2 Williams WC. The doctor stories. Compiled would envy you,/ especially the being caught off balance that he reveals some by Robert Coles. New Directions Books: through.’7 secret twist of a whole community´s pathetic New York, 1984. 3 Williams WC. Paterson. Revised edition way of thought, a man is suddenly seized In his autobiographical The practice, prepared by Christopher MacGowan. again with a desire to speak of the under- Williams explained: Carcanet: Manchester, 1992. ground stream which for a moment has 4 Markel H. Blowing the whistle: the intern- ‘My business, aside from the mere physical come up just under the surface.’1 ship of William Carlos Williams MD, and diagnosis, is to make a different sort of diag- his abrupt resignation from the New York Williams was only awarded the nursery and child´s hospital. Arch Pediatr nosis concerning –patients– as individuals’.1 Pulitzer posthumously for Pictures from Adolesc Med 2000;154:952–5. Narrative-based medicine finds a mine Brueghel. Perhaps if he would have lived, 5 Williams WC. In The collected poems of William Carlos Williams, 1909–1939 Vol 1. of references in this great doctor–nar- then, he might have responded by para- New Directions Publishing Corporation: rator who regarded ‘medicine’ as ‘the phrasing his The last words of my English New York, 1991. very thing that made it possible for me to grandmother (Emily Dickinsonb of 6 Williams WC. In The collected poems of write’,1 who left little out of his writings Chichester) about recognition that William Carlos Williams, 1939–1962, Vol 2. concerning a physician’s ‘being through’ comes too little too late: New Directions Publishing Corporation: New York, 1991. after a lifetime of careful listening: ‘we passed a long row/ of elms. She looked at 7 Berryman J. Dream song 324: an elegy for ‘Forget writing, it´s a trivial matter. But day them/ awhile out of/ the ambulance window W.C.W, the lovely man. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc: New York, 1969. in day out, when the inarticulate patient and said,// What are all those/ fuzzy-looking struggles to lay himself bare for you, or with things out there?/ Trees? Well, I´m tired/ of Address for correspondence: Dr I 5 them and rolled her head away’. lniesta, The Walton Centre NHS

b Foundation Trust, Lower Lane, Her original name was Emily Dickenson References Wellcome, but Williams probably renamed it Fazakerley, Liverpool L9 7LJ after the great 19th century American poet 1 Williams WC. Autobiography. New Directions Email: ivan.iniesta@thewaltoncentre. Emily Dickinson (1830 –86). Publishing Corporation: New York, 1967. nhs.uk