Infused with hope, heartbreak, and humor, this book gathers our greatest poets from antiquity to the present, prescribing new perspectives on doctors and patients, remedies and procedures, illness and recovery. A literary elixir, Poetry in Medicine displays the genre's capacity to heal us.

Best known as one of the great short story writers of the twentieth century, Raymond Carver also published several volumes of poetry and considered himself as much a poet as a fiction writer. Sandra Lee Kleppe focuses particularly on the complex literary and scientific systems that influenced Carver’s development as a writer as she makes a case for the quality of Carver’s poetic output and the centrality of poetry to Carver’s career.

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 ‘de-familiarising’ old habits and bringing poetic forms of ‘close reading’ to the clinic. Bleakley and Neilson carry out an extensive critical examination of the well-established practices of narrative medicine to show that non-narrative, lyrical poetry does different kind of work, previously unexamined, such as place eclipsing time. They articulate a groundbreaking ‘lyrical medicine’ that promotes aesthetic, ethical and political practices as well as noting the often-concealed metaphor cache of biomedicine. Demonstrating that ambiguity is a key resource in both poetry and medicine, the authors anatomise poetic and medical practices as forms of extended and situated cognition, grounded in close readings of singular contexts. They illustrate structural correspondences between poetic diction and clinical thinking, such as use of sound and metaphor. This provocative examination of the meaningful overlap between poetic and clinical work is an essential read for researchers and practitioners interested in extending the reach of medical and health humanities, narrative medicine, medical education and English literature.