Poetry in Medicine: An Anthology of Poems About Doctors, Patients, Illness and Healing

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.  

For millennia poets have described the ailments of the body and those who treat them. Infused with hope, heartbreak, and unexpected humor, this book gathers diverse poems about our medical experiences—poems about doctors and patients, remedies and procedures, illnesses and convalescence—each one prescribing a unique perspective and new revelations.  A literary elixir, Poetry in Medicine showcases not only the breadth of poetry’s relationship to medicine, but also the genre’s unparalleled capacity to heal us.

Contributors include Auden, Baudelaire, Berryman, Blake, Bishop, Boland, Campo, Cavafy, Clampitt, Chaucer, Clifton, Cummings, Dickinson, Donne, Conan Doyle, Eliot, Frost, Gunn, Hall, Hass, Hayden, Hirsch, Heaney, O. W. Holmes, Kooser, Larkin, Longfellow, Lowell, Merrill, Milne, Milton, Nash, Ovid, Pinsky, Plath, Rilke, Shakespeare, Seshardi, Sexton, Stevens, Szymborska, Whitman, Williams, Yeats, et al.