Hippocrates poetry prize -- deadline extended

The deadline for the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine has been extended to 15 February. The prize will be announced at the splendid sounding 2010 International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine being held in Warwick on 10 April.

8.45am Registration
9.25am Symposium start
5pm Close of Symposium followed by a reception for speakers, delegates and Hippocrates Prize winners.

Symposium speakers will include: Peter Goldsworthy Poet and medical practitioner, Australia Michael Hulse Editor, The Warwick Review

Symposium topics will include: poetry in medical settings (oncology, cardiovascular disorders, childhood illness ...); doctor poets (Gottfried Benn, William Carlos Williams); poetry in the consultation; creative health professionals; medical inspirations for poetry (anatomy; poisoning in Shakespeare's writings ...).

Call for papers
Submissions are welcome for the Symposium as posters for discussion or short oral communications. Email the Symposium Office to express interest in submitting a Symposium Abstract. Closing date for Symposium Abstract submission has been brought forward to 6pm Friday 19th February 2010.

Key themes will include: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; 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 Symposium is being held on the awards day for the 2010 International Hippocrates Prize for poetry and medicine.

2010 Hippocrates Prize - Closing deadline 12 midnight GMT Monday 15th February. The 2010 Hippocrates Prize awards will be announced at the Symposium. There is a £15,000 award fund for the prizes, which will be given in an ‘open’ category which anyone can enter and in an ‘NHS’ category open to National Health Service employees and health students. The first prize for the winning poem in each category is £5,000.

Broadcaster, journalist and writer James Naughtie are joining NHS Medical Director Professor Sir Bruce Keogh and poet and Doctor Dannie Abse as judges of this new pair of national and international medical poetry awards.

The 2010 Hippocrates Prize is being organised by a joint team from the University of Warwick’s Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies and the University’s Medical School.

The International Poetry and Medicine Symposium and the 2010 Hippocrates Prize are supported by the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick and by the national Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine.

Nurse Jackie

What to make of the new hospital series Nurse Jackie? Having watched the first week of episodes (thank you iPlayer! It's screening on BBC2 at 10 pm every night), it's hard not to feel rather horrified. Nurse Jackie is, in so many ways, inspirational. She acts in the patient's best interests. She subverts hospital bureaucracy whenever necessary, stealing from the bad to give to the more deserving. Unless, of course, the patient is a misogynist with diplomatic immunity, in which case she has no compunction is flushing his ear (sliced off by a prostitute he attacked) down the toilet. So far, so entertaining. But Jackie has a serious drug problem. She scores pills from her pharmacist lover, and takes them in a variety of ways -- from sprinkling them in her coffee to snorting up the contents of capsules.

The idea of a 'conflicted' health professional is not new. House has a drug problem too, along with brilliant clinical judgement. Why then, in Nurse Jackie so much more disturbing? Jackie is smart and sassy, and it is so refreshing to see a nurse in the prime role rather than another stereotyped doctor. But the message that Jackie gives is that it is not possible to cope with the job unless you have a pharmaceutical crutch. What sort of a role model is she?

There are plenty of cop shows on TV that show corruption, and we don't worry that these are serving as poor role models for aspiring policemen and women. Also, there is no shortage of doctor dramas that highlight character flaws in health professionals. So why do I feel so anxious watching Nurse Jackie? I think it is because we are seeing something new by way of character development, hinted at in House but fully developed in Nurse Jackie. Usually in TV dramas, you have clearly identifiable 'goodies' and 'baddies'. Over the course of a series, one type might turn out to be another, but almost invariably, character flaws are explicable in terms of someone's circumstances. The evidence of the first week of Nurse Jackie, however, plays havoc with the usual conventions of TV drama. Jackie has a lovely family: gorgeous husband and two adorable daughters. She is good at her job. And she seems entirely unconflicted by her frequent unethical personal behaviour. This may, of course, all come unstuck over the course of the series, but it's too late. We already love Nurse Jackie for her sheer chutzpah and her apparent ability to be in total control of her complicated life. Most tellingly, one would really want her on your side if you were a patient.

Medical students often tell me that they are inspired by House. But they do realise that House is utterly unrealistic, and most admit that they would not like to be his patient. For all its good writing and well researched medical interventions, House still comes across as a bit of a soap opera. Personal relationships unfold within a clinic that looks like a hotel, with little evidence of the demands of 'real' medicine. Nurse Jackie sets up greater intimacy with the viewer, using the Gray's Anatomy voice-over technique to impart wisdom. The bureaucracy in the hospital makes it feel more realistic, albeit in a rather superficial way. She is a far more sympathetic character than the gruff and misanthropic House ever could be.

Nurse Jackie will undoubtedly inspire more people to enter the nursing profession -- and that's good. We need more nurses. But we have to trust that people can distinguish right from wrong. Drug taking has no place in the profession, but this doesn't mean we should condemn a well-written, well-acted TV drama.

Brian Fies at Comics and Medicine conference

Brian Fies, writer of the award-winning Mom's Cancer, will be speaking at the Comics and Medicine conference. Brian is a pioneer in the use of the graphic novel to communicate about illness, and his book has become a classic. I'm really looking forward to meeting him. The deadline for proposals for papers and posters is 29 January: more information here.

Medical Poetry Prize

A major new poetry prize has been announced. The Hippocrates Prize is an annual competition for a poem on a medical subject. There is a separate category for NHS employees and UK students. The first prize is £5000. The only catch is that each entry costs £6. The deadline is 31 January.

Comics and medicine conference

The lovely and talented Ian Williams over at Graphic Medicine is organising a conference called 'Comics and Medicine: Medical Narrative in Graphic Novels'. It's scheduled for 17 June 1010 at the Institute for English Studies at UCL. It should be a real treat.

Confirmed keynote lectures by Paul Gravett and Marc Zaffran

This one-day interdisciplinary conference aims to explore medical narrative in graphic novels and comics. Although the first comic book was invented in 1837 the long-format graphic narrative has only become a distinct and unique body of literary work relatively recently. Thanks in part to the growing Medical Humanities movement, many medical schools now encourage the reading of iterature and the study of art to gain insights into the human condition. A serious content for comics is not new but representation of illness in graphic novels is an increasing trend. The melding of text and visuals in graphic fiction and non-fiction has much to offer medical professionals, students and, indeed, patients. Among the growing number of graphic novels, a sub-genre exploring the patients' and the carers' experiences of illness or disability has emerged.

Papers and posters are invited on issues related to, but not restricted to, the following themes:
•What motivates authors to produce graphic narratives with medical content?
•How does the audience for this growing genre differ from traditional markets for so-called ‘pathographies’?
•What additional insights can graphic narratives offer into healthcare compared with literature and film?
•What international trends are discernible in the production and reception of medical graphic narratives?
•What are the ethical implications of using graphic narratives to disseminate public health messages?
•What are the strengths of graphic fiction in bioethics conversations? In conversations between patients and health care workers?
•How have patients (and patient communities) turned to graphic fiction to communicate health care and advocacy information to other patients, their family and surrounding community, and their physicians?
•How do patient-created graphic fictions/narratives differ from physician- or health-care industry-created graphic narratives? What does this imply about the role played by graphic fiction in institutionalized medicine?
•How can graphic stories be used in medical education and patient education?
•What are the roles of graphic stories in enhancing communication within the medical profession, in scholarship and in the medical humanities?

Contributions are sought from humanities scholars, comics scholars, healthcare professionals, comics enthusiasts, writers and cartoonists.

300 word proposals for a 20 minute paper or a poster should be submitted by Friday 29th January 2010 to submissions@graphicmedicine.org

Abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract

We acknowledge receipt and answer to all proposals submitted. Abstracts will be peer reviewed blind and papers for presentation will be selected by Friday 26th of February 2010.

A report of the conference will be submitted to relevant journals and websites. All the papers and posters accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for development in a themed volume (subject to funding).

Paul Gravett is a London-based freelance journalist, curator, lecturer, writer and broadcaster, who has worked in comics publishing and promotion since 1981. He has curated numerous exhibitions of comic art in Britain and in Europe and since 2003 has been the director of Comica, London's International Comics Festival at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Paul is the co-author, with Peter Stanbury, of the books Manga: 60 Years Of Japanese Comics (2004), Graphic Novels: Stories To Change Your Life (2005), Great British Comics: Celebrating A Century Of Ripping Yarns & Wizard Wheezes (2006), The Leather Nun & Other Incredibly Strange Comics (2008) and he is the editor of The Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics (2008). On television he has been a consultant and interview subject on The South Bank Show's programme Manga Mania (2006) and BBC4's documentary series Comics Britannia (2007). Also, he appeared as interview subject in the DVD documentary The Mindscape Of Alan Moore (2007). He continues to write about comics for various periodicals.

Marc Zaffran, M.D. is a French-born Family Physician and a writer (under the pen name Martin WInckler). He is currently a researcher at the University of Montreal. He has written forty books including novels and essays on patient doctor relationship, the ethics of healthcare and the representation of Doctors in mass-media fiction including pulp novels, television drama and comic-books. He is currently studying the works of a French doctor and comic-book artist,
Charles Masson.

Reminiscing

I was just going through my old files on my computer when I stumbled upon a folder marked 'Humanities'. I double-clicked on it with a smile. Good times.

We once went to _______ Museum/Gallery (Okay so I can't remember where it was..) and saw Monet's work. Giskin had asked us to/made us come up with a poem. And I found the one I wrote and thought since I was in such a good mood, I'd post it up here.

There once was a man who painted
Art so great, a lady swooned and fainted
The useless young miss
Awoke only to a kiss
To find herself all but tainted.

Narrative Remains at the Hunterian

Karen Ingham's new film and exhibit, Narrative Remains, at the Hunterian Museum is a fine example of not only Medical Humanities but also of doing a great deal with very little. Her subjects are a series of pathological specimens, collected and annotated by John Hunter. Neat little jars, with neat little labels, whose contents are anything but - among them, the throat and larynx of a singer silenced by tuberculosis, a diseased liver, a cancerous lung and bowel segment. Ingham's work takes the viewer right inside Hunter's pathology lab as he decides which specimens to keep, and then removes and preserves them. Yet it is not his voice we hear. Instead, the narrative of the remains is given by the patients themselves. It is as if their spirits hovered at Hunter's shoulder while he worked, reading the notes he made, explaining how they suffered and understanding why they died. They are neat little ghosts, calmed by death, intrigued by their awakening, first by Hunter, then by Ingham. If they sound pleased that out of so many specimens, so many dead, they have been selected for immortality, then they should be. Ingham's film may be small scale but it is technically flawless. The jars are lit and photographed like bright jewels, drawing the viewer towards the unsettling contents at their heart, mesmerising. The film echoes the overall effect of the Hunterian Museum itself, with its own extraordinary setting of light and glass.

Everything about the exhibit is useful and moving. The catalogue essays are models of clarity. Part of the film is genuinely funny (no spoiler). This is what museums should be doing - allowing artists of vision to interpret and illuminate their permanent collections - bringing life, light and understanding, allowing the silent to speak.

Narrative Remains is at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 35-43 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PE. Open 10-5pm Tues- Sat. Free Admission. Exhibit runs until 5th December.