Poetry Metaphor and Medicine, The Hippocrates Poetry Prize

The International Hippocrates Poetry Prize was established to reflect the links between the widest sense of medical experiences: life, death and everything in between and our human urge to communicate these through the power of language. This Global Poetry Competition has two categories: one for National Health related employees and the other an open prize that anyone can enter. The first prize in each category is £5000. And I was delighted to be awarded a commendation in the open category. It was a privilege to attend the Symposium and award ceremony at Warwick University, I have attended many poetry events however this proved to be especially fascinating. Mixing with medical professionals and writers brought home to me the potential power of writing in response to our experience of medicine, as patient, carers of those close to us, and those wearing the “white coats.”
There is a long and honourable history of poets and writers. Keats was a qualified doctor, and so also the great poet William Carlos Williams, Anton Chekov, and W. Somerset Maugham, and more recently the poet and doctor Dannie Abse.
But the huge volume of entries, 1,500 from 23 countries, testified to the power of poetry to help make sense of personal experience of suffering, sometimes death, and often the long road to recovery, from the perspective of relatives, patients and health professionals. Language and the human desire to communicate story and experience being the common denominator.
The first prize awarded in the NHS category is a poem titled The Chief Radiographer Considers, which uses the narrative of the Curies’ pioneering work to powerful metaphorical effect. The poet, Paula Cunningham is a Belfast dentist.
Poets often contend for recognition through a plethora of poetry competitions, and poetry is a small world. Mark Lawson, one of the 3 judges, made a strong point that unusually this competition was judged anonymously, with the typescripts only stating which category the poem was entered for.
Listening to the readings from the prize winning poets and guest poets Marilyn Hacker, and Gwyneth Lewis, I was struck by the immense power of metaphor, both poetic and medical, in helping us to integrate and make sense of our “body of knowledge.”