Healthy scepticism

Despite my lack of recent blogging (due partly to working full time last year which nearly broke me and partly to a qualm or two about patient confidentiality, given the traceability of bloggers), I have still been talking about medical humanities and even have discovered, to my delight, a secret poet amongst my surgical colleagues, along with a self-published children's book author.

I have explained the concepts to my family and friends, waxing lyrical over the benefits of adding the arts into the nooks and crannies of medical life, where things reverberate.
However, there are some amongst my acquaintance who are clearly not convinced...

I publish these verses, by a friend:


THE MEDICAL HUMANITIES
(in the style of W.S.Gilbert)

At the outset I must mention
it is not my 'vowed intention
to deplore the intervention by a creche of Keyhole Kates
into Medical Humanities,
or other such urbanities
('though similar insanities add tuppence to the rates).

It's a brotherhood of sisters
(devotees of Joseph Lister's)
who extol the works of Misters: Milton, Coleridge and Keats
as an aid to better rounding
of a surgeon's basic grounding
or, at least, that's what it's sounding like: an aid to greater feats.

A colostomy, gastrectomy,
a routine appendectomy,
or, p'raps the odd vasectomy to brighten up their day.
Then maybe, if they feel the itch,
a final fling with blanket stitch
before a song (at concert pitch) to chase their cares away.

They'll be oh, so sympathetic
(not a bit of it synthetic)
while prescribing an emetic, 'though, as sure as “Heinz means Beans”,
this firmly rooted notion
of such lit'rary promotion
will result in their denotion as a bunch of “Milton-keens”.


Signed : Sceptic, of Sale
(With tongue firmly embedded in cheek), to my favourite left-handed Registrar.