Poetry in Medicine
An Anthology of Poems about Doctors, Patients, Illness, and Healing
Michael Salcman (Editor)

Foreword by Michael Collier

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.

Among the poets included are W.H. Auden, Charles Baudelaire, John Berryman, William Blake, Elizabeth Bishop, Eavan Boland, Rafael Campo, C.P. Cavafy,  Geoffrey Chaucer, Amy Clampitt, Lucille Clifton, E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, Robert Hayden, Seamus Heaney, Edward Hirsch, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ted Kooser, Philip Larkin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, A.A. Milne, John Milton, Ogden Nash, Ovid, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Ranier Maria Rilke, William Shakespeare, Vijay Seshardi, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Wislawa Szymborska, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, and many more.

“Who better to write about the mysteries of the body and the mind under stress than ever-vigilant, temperature-taking, empathic poets?”
—Booklist

Michael Salcman is a poet, neurosurgeon, and art historian, formerly chair of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is author of six medical textbooks and six collections of verse,. He lectures widely on art and the brain.

Paperback / $28.00 (Can $27.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-449-2 / 372 pages / Poetry / Medicine