Off Sick; Narratives of Illness Past and Present

Scholars from the universities of Glamorgan and Cardiff are currently breaking new ground in the Medical Humanities with the Off Sick project, writes Dr Richard Marsden. This research initiative, led by Dr Martin Willis and Dr Keir Waddington, puts a new twist on the well-known concept of the ‘illness narrative’. It focuses not on the people who actually suffer from illness, but instead on those who support and care for them. In this vein the project team is currently gathering stories from carers across the South Wales area.
This is very much an interdisciplinary project, which aims to explore not only how carers construct and define their experiences through stories in the present day, but also how they did so in previous decades and centuries. Moreover, Off Sick also brings in comparative material from the literary sphere, including fictional accounts, life-writing and poetry.
The peg on which this work is hung is the encounter with ‘medical institutions’. Indeed, the very idea of the illness narrative arose partly in response to a tendency for clinicians to neglect the experiences of the patient, seeing them instead in de-personalized terms as biological problems to be solved with science. Illness narratives are often perceived as a means of reversing this trend and re-empowering the patient.
For that reason, the stories that Off Sick is particularly interested in deal with visits to hospitals and other clinical settings. However, it is the ways in which carers and family members turn their experiences of such encounters into narratives that is the real crux of this research. This emphasis on the stories of those around illness, together with its holistic and comparative approach to contemporary, historical and literary materials, is what makes Off Sick so innovative.
The project’s findings will be showcased through academic presentations and publications, and also through an exhibition (scheduled for June 2011) which is aimed not at academics but at individuals and groups whose lives have been affected by illness and who have their own stories to tell about it. In addition, Off Sick runs a lively, varied and ongoing programme of events and public talks drawing on the expertise of literary scholars, historians, social scientists and medical practitioners.
For more information on the project you can visit the Off Sick website (http://literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk/cissmi/offsick/), join the Off Sick Facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Off-Sick/133055340078848) or follow Off Sick on Twitter (http://twitter.com/OffSick). Alternatively please contact the project’s Research Assistant, Dr Richard Marsden, on rmarsden@glam.ac.uk.

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2011 International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine

I recently attended the 2nd Annual Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Symposium, which was held at Warwick Medical School and hosted by Professor Donald Singer and Associate Professor Michael Hulse. During the day, a group of researchers and clinicians from a variety of backgrounds gathered to explore the role of poetry in the discourse of medicine, including renowned poets, Marilyn Hacker and Gwyneth Lewis.
Themes included: 
history of interactions between medicine, health and poetry; impact of health and disease on the writings of the professional poet; poetry as therapy; the nature of the body, and anatomy; the history, evolution, current and future state of medical science; the nature and experience of tests; use of poetry in health professional training, the experience of doctors, nurses and other staff in hospitals and in the community; the experience of patients, families, friends and carers in these situations; the experiences of acute and long-term illness and dying, of birth, of cure and convalescence; the patient journey; the nature and experience of treatment with herbs, chemicals and devices used in medicine.
The diversity of both the themes and the backgrounds of the presenters, and attendees, signify a very important movement in contemporary medical practice; namely, to address the experience of practicing medicine, and the humanistic elements of the doctor and patient interaction.
Our contemporary clinical settings are surrounded by an array of machines, sterility, and the attempt to reach purity through the annihilation of disease and illness. During this battle, it is all too easy to lose the identity of who we are and who we are fighting for amongst the technology and techniques we can enact to engage with pathology. Yet, when the body is inflamed, and inflicted, with the wars between health and illness, and life and death, the nature of poetry reveals itself to be fundamental to our experience of being human. And this awareness was achieved throughout the symposium, with speakers such as Professor Femi Oyebode declaring the “same skills you need to write are the same skills you need to be a good doctor”.
In parallel to descriptions of symptoms and diagnoses, poetry describes the inner states of a person, the territory immune from any form of empirical probing. A poem is, in itself, a “machine made of words” (William Carlos Williams). The words one writes have a function; they are not just ethereal images and metaphors, or, as another of the presenters, Dr Sandy Goldbeck-Wood said, “poetry embodies the indescribable – poetry has a physical element; it encodes suffering”.
Such communication is vital for Medicine’s endeavor; to heal, the wound must be identified.
The identification of wounds in individuals and communities are both bodies of symptoms, exuberating into the environment which contains our living presence. This was illustrated most poignantly by the work of Dr Sorcha Gunne, who has analysed women’s poetry about HIV/Aids in South Africa.
Through a person’s narrative, a discourse forms, and in medicine it is one that serves the doctor and patient relationship.
Fiona Hamilton, from the writing organization, LAPIDUS, describes narratives as tools that “allow for confrontation between doctors and patients without jeopardizing the emotional disassociation required”. Poetry was also demonstrated to be an indiscriminate force; physical boundaries and limitations are transcended. Age, gender, culture, ethnicity, are irrelevant. Speakers Dr Simon Opher and Karen Hayes presented an exceptional project, working with elderly patients affected by dementia to reconstruct memory through metaphor – one of the last language functions to deteriorate in Alzheimer’s disease – and return to them their stories, because “stories are the architecture of who we are”.
On the other side of the spectrum – and world – Dr Renee Liang of New Zealand, showed the success of community initiatives that encourage under-privileged young people to release their frustrations and anger – as well as pride and joy – through poetry, and the positive impact that this has on their health.
The poem, though, is also for the healer. Nurse, Sue Spencer, described techniques for teaching nurses in medical education the value of words for the “(he)art of nursing”.
It also became apparent that medicine’s healing hands write in arenas other than the surgery, the hospital, the care home. Reflection on our human condition; its fragility and its robustness is part of the world we embody, and Rogan Wolf’s presentation “Poems in Public on the Frontier” personified this notion.
Finally, towards the end of a day characterized by moments of epiphany and realization of connections between the body and the mind, medicine and the human condition, there was a very special announcement. The symposium also marked the occasion to announce the winners of the annual International Hippocrates Poetry prize:
The winners of the open international awards were: ▪ 1st Prize: Michael Henry (Cheltenham, England) – The Patella Hammer. ▪ 2nd Prize: Cheryl Moskowitz (London, England) – Correspondence with the Care Home. ▪ 3rd Prize: Johanna Emeney (Albany, New Zealand) – Radiologist’s Report.
The winners of the NHS category awards were: ▪ 1st Prize: Paula Cunningham (Belfast, N Ireland) – The Chief Radiographer Considers. ▪ 2nd Prize: Wendy French (London, England) – The Doctor’s Wife. 3rd Prize: Dr Sandy Goldbeck-Wood (Cambridge, England) – Inappropriate ADH.

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The Drama of Medicine-All the Ward’s a Stage: 8th Annual AMH Conference, 11-13 July 2011, University of Leicester,UK

Plans for the 8th annual conference of the Association for Medical Humanities are now well underway, with an exciting line up of papers, workshops and plenary speakers. Celebrated poet and doctor Dannie Abse will be running a session entitled Poet in a White Coat; Jed Mercurio, author of Bodies and creator of the TV series Cardiac Arrest, will speak on the Doctor as Antihero;  Professor Laurie Maguire, from Magdalen College Oxford, will explore Shakespeare’s guide to health and illness; and Matthew Alexander from North Carolina, a leading authority on the use of cinema in medical education, will begin the conference with a workshop and plenary address on this subject.
Other workshops cover medicine in comics, architecture in health and photography, and a video of experiences in a heart and lung transplant unit.  There are nearly 50 short papers exploring the conference themes of Dramatis personae (people), Plays and Plots (stories), and The Stage (settings and environments).
Delegates are attending from throughout the UK ,as well as from the Republic of Ireland, Canada, the USA and Sri Lanka.  Sign up soon to join them!
To book either a full residential package or a day delegate spot, go on-line at www.shop.le.ac.uk For any queries contact the conference team at amhconf@le.ac.uk
Whether you’re a seasoned AMH member, or simply someone who wants to find out more about medical humanities, this is sure to be an enjoyable and thought provoking way to spend a couple of days.

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