Does <i>A Body of Work</i> contribute anything substantially new to this genre? The answer is a resounding yes ... [This is] not just an anthology of poems with the relevant subject matter ... but rather an exploration of the relationship between poems and medical beliefs at the time of their writing ... I strongly recommend <i>A Body of Work</i> to anyone interested in poetry about illness, or poetry and medicine, especially students of the health care professions and their teachers.

Medical Humanities blog

<i>A Body of Work</i> offers a unique perspective into the history of literature and medicine. Wagner and Brown have created a book that is certainly worth having within easy reach for its accessible engagement with some of the fundamental questions which have shaped contemporary understandings of bodily experience throughout history.

Centre for Medical Humanities online

This is a superb collection and I think a first. There are smaller anthologies such as <i>Tools of the Trade</i> but this dwarfs the others. I shall be recommending it widely in my lectures and seminars of the use of poetry in medical education both in the UK and Europe.

Dr Trevor G Stammers, St Mary's University, UK

A Body of Work includes poems by writers from the dawn of Enlightenment to the 21st Century and explores changing attitudes to medicine, health and the body. The book is divided into eight thematic sections, each of which includes a chronological range of poetry and excerpts of important historical and contextual medical writing. The sections are:

Body as machine
Nerves, mind, and brain
Consuming
Illness, disease, and disability
Treatment
Hospitals, practitioners, and professionals
Sex, evolution, and reproduction
Ageing and dying

Includes work by such poets as: Dannie Abse, Maya Angelou, Simon Armitage, Margaret Atwood, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, John Burnside, Raymond Carver, Lucille Clifton, S. T. Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Mark Doty, T.S. Eliot, Paul Farley, Ann Finch, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Graves, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ted Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Paul Muldoon, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, John Addington Symonds, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams.

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Introduction
1. The Material Body: The Body as Machine
2. Mind and Body: Nerves, Nervous Disorders and Psychology
3. Consuming: Food, Drugs and Alcohol
4. Contagion and Disease
5. The Profession: Doctors, Hospitals and the Experience of Medicine
6. Treatments and Cures
7. The Body in Pleasure; The Body in Pain
8. Evolution, Genetics and Reproduction
9. Age and Ageing, Death and Dying
Suggested Reading and Bibliography
Index

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Including poems from the Early Modern period to today, this anthology explores how poetry has reflected changing attitudes to medicine and the human body.
An anthology of medical poetry from the Middle Ages to today alongside contextual historical writing

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781472513298
Publisert
2016-02-25
Utgiver
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; Bloomsbury Academic
Vekt
820 gr
Høyde
232 mm
Bredde
154 mm
Dybde
32 mm
Aldersnivå
G, P, U, 01, 06, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
560

Om bidragsyterne

Corinna Wagner is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Exeter, UK. She publishes on the history of medicine and visual culture, and is author of Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture (2013) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism (2016).

Andy Brown
is Senior Lecturer and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, UK. A widely published poet, novelist and critic, his books of poetry include Exurbia (2014), The Fool and the Physician (2012) and Goose Music (with John Burnside, 2008). His first novel is Apples & Prayers (2015).