Poetry in the Clinic

This book explores previously unexamined overlaps between the poetic imagination and the medical mind. It shows how appreciation of poetry can help us to engage with medicine in more intense ways based on 'defamiliarising' old habits and bringing poetic forms of 'close reading' to the clinic.

Part I: Setting Out to Alter the Narrative. 1.In difference (and not deference) to narrative medicine. 2.The imperialism of narrative. 3.What's the story behind Narrative Medicine? The shared epistemologies of Narrative Medicine and biomedicine. 4.Is narrative medicine just another story biomedicine tells before we go to sleep? 5.What can Russian Formalism do for us lately? & other unapplications. Part II: Theorising Lyrical Medicine 6.Re-visioning diagnostic reasoning, or stepping out from the skull. 7.Out from the skull and into the world. 8.Celebrating lyric poetry, beauty and medical moods. 9.Poeticising with a medical imagination: what medicine can do for poetry. 10.Diagnosing with the poetic imagination: what poetry can do for medicine. 11.Kinds of ambiguity in clinical work. 12.General Change and The Poetry Uselessness Red Book. 13.Tactical ambiguity spelunking amidst Canadian physician-poets. 14.Practitioner-Poets do the Footwork.