Poetry and medicine: from helping patients in palliative care to educating health professionals

The 6th Hippocrates Symposium on Poetry and Medicine will be held in London on Friday 22nd May 2015 and will conclude with the Awards Ceremony for the 2015 Open, NHS and Young Poets Prize.

The Symposium will include posters, lectures, round table discussions and poetry readings.

Poets shortlisted for the Hippocrates Prize

There will be sessions on historical and contemporary themes, illness and poetry, poetry as therapy, poetry in the education of medical students, nurses and doctors, and poetry as an aid to health professionals. 

The programme of lectures, round table discussions, poetry readings and the Hippocrates Awards Ceremony will be published on the Symposium website. 

The Symposium Faculty includes:

Catherine Bailey (Northumbria Uni: poetry and dementia); Giskin Day (Imperial College, London: speaker on poetry in medical education); Wendy French (University College Hospital, London: poetry in palliative care and poetry reading); Joseph Gascho (Hummelstown, USA: poetry and echocardiography); Rebecca Goss (poetry reading and 2015 judge); Michael Hulse (University of Warwick; chair); Romi Jones (poetry and dementia); Femi Oyebode (University of Birmingham; 2015 judge); Simon Rae (2015 judge); Vicky Riley (University College Hospital, London: poetry in paliatitve care); Donald Singer (FPM, London; chair); Ellen Storm (Liverpool: poetry reading); Karen McCarthy Woolf (London: poetry reading); John Riddington Young (speaker: Bidford - Phineas Fletcher and the Purple Island).

More about the shortlisted and commended entrants for the 2015 Hippocrates Prize.

EACPT Lifetime Achievement Award for Professor Michel Eichelbaum

The 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award of the European Association of Clinical Pharmacology and

Therapeutics will go to German researcher Professor Michel Eichelbaum for his outstanding contribution to the national and international benefits of clinical pharmacology for medicine, health care and patient safety. The Award, which includes the EACPT silver medal, will be presented to Professor Eichelbaum during the 12th EACPT Congress in Madrid on Saturday 27th June 2015.

Michel Eichelbaum's primary research interest is pharmacogenetics of drug metabolizing enzymes and transporter proteins. He was a pioneer in the study of the stereochemistry of drugs,  use of stable isotopes in clinical pharmacology, and intestinal metabolism and transport of drugs. 

In 1975, he discovered a genetic polymorphism in the oxidation of the antiarrhythmic and oxytocic drug, sparteine, which later became known as CYP2D6 polymorphism. This is considered his single most important scientific discovery. Later, he became involved in research on factors involved in the regulation of drug-metabolizing enzymes and transporters with special emphasis on nuclear receptors.

See more about Professor Eichelbaum in my blog on the EACPT site.

The EACPT was founded 22 years ago and now includes as members all national organisations for clinical pharmacology in Europe, as well as organisations from further afield internationally. The EACPT aims to provide educational and scientific support for the more than 4000 individual professionals interested in clinical pharmacology and therapeutics throughout the European region, with its congresses attended by a global audience. The EACPT also advises policy makers on how the specialty can contribute to human health and wealth.

90 years for the Postgraduate Medical Journal

A Symposium is being organised by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine to mark the 90th Anniversary of its first official journal, the Postgraduate Medical Journal. The Symposium will be held at the Medical Society of London on on 1st October 2015.
Speakers on the day will comment on what medicine was like in the 1920s, current progress in their field, and what is in prospect over the next 90 years.
Other speakers will include FPM Fellow Professor Peter Barnes FRS, London, who will speak on advances in respiratory medicine, Professor Dame Carol Black, Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge and Past-President of the Royal College of Physicians who will discuss opportunities to improve public health through a focus on health in the workplace, Professor Melanie Davies (Leicester) on progress in managing diabetes, vascular surgeon Professor Alison Halliday (Oxford) on carotid surgery to prevent stroke, FPM Fellow chemical biologist Andrew Marsh (Warwick) who will discuss advances in drug discovery, FPM Fellow cardiac surgeon Wade Dimitri (Coventry) who will discuss early development of heart surgery  Dr Paul Nunn (London), former Director of the WHO Tuberculosis Programme, on advances in managing tuberculosis, FPM Fellow Professor Munir Pirmohamed (Liverpool) who will discuss Progress in Personalised Medicine, Emeritus Professor Terence Ryan (Oxford) on Sir William Osler and Professor Karol Sikora (London) on cancer - a disease of our time.

The Postgraduate Medical Journal publishes topical reviews, commentaries and original papers on themes across the medical spectrum. It provides continuing professional development for all doctors, from those in training, to their teachers, and active clinicians, by publishing papers on a wide range of topics relevant to clinical practice.
Papers published in the PMJ describe current practice and new developments in all branches of medicine; describe relevance and impact of translational research on clinical practice; provide background relevant to examinations; and papers on medical education and medical education research.  The FPM is a British non-profit organisation founded in the autumn of 1919 as a merger of the Fellowship of Medicine and the Postgraduate Medical Association, with Sir William Osler as its first president. Its initial aims were the development of educational programmes in all branches of postgraduate medicine. 
The FPM organises clinical and research meetings and publishes two journals. The FPM has since 1925 published the international journal, the Postgraduate Medical Journal. In 2012 the Fellowship launched a new international journal, Health Policy and Technology, published on the Fellowship's behalf by Elsevier.

Human experience at its most raw: the short-list for the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

The judges have just met to agree shortlisted and commended poems in the Open International and NHS categories of the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

Poets from New York and the UK, a general practitioner, a radiologist and a former counsellor are among finalists for this year’s Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. At £5000 first prize in both Open and NHS categories, this is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. The winners will be announced at an International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine at the Medical Society of London on Friday May 22nd.

Now in its 5th year, the short-listed entries for the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine have been selected from around 1000 entries, from 31 countries by judges poet Rebecca Goss, psychiatrist Professor Femi Oyebode and doctor and writer Theodore Dalrymple.

Short-listed in the Open Category are teacher and writer Maya Popa from New York, and poets Pascale Petit and Catherine Ayres from the UK. Competing for the UK NHS 2015 Hippocrates £5000 first prize are former counsellor Kate Compston, GP Ann Lilian Jay, tutor Carole Bromley and radiologist Rowena Warwick.

See more about the shortlisted poets.

The judges also agreed 13 commendations in the NHS category, and 18 in the Open International category, from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the USA and New Zealand.


See full list of Open and NHS commendations.

Judge Rebecca Goss said: “The subject of medicine is sprawling and complex, but poetry is the perfect medium to explore it closely and aid our understanding of human experience at its most raw. A variety of voices make up the winning and commended entries in this year’s Hippocrates Prize. Experiences of both medic and patient are explored, but so too, are the insights of the bystander. Included in this list are the carers, the relatives, the friends, revealing the impact illness also has on their lives."

Judge Professor Femi Oyebode said “I feel very privileged to be involved in the Hippocrates poetry prize. This experience has been most humbling.”

He added: “The wondrous thing is to imagine that these are poems written by healthcare workers who, in their everyday work, deploy their technical expertise with emotional commitment and compassion, all over the world, in a variety of settings in order to care for people; and yet, in-between times, having observed the most extraordinary human situations of trauma, tragedy, hope, despair, death and suffering, find the words to communicate these with sensitivity, with original and unique images, and sometimes with humor.”

Judge Theodore Dalrymple remarked: “Once again, the Hippocrates Prize has stimulated poets and health workers around the word to put their experiences of hope, despair, sadness, and compassion into poetic form, with impressive success.”

See more about the awards on the Hippocrates Poetry website

Simon Rae discussing poetry, medicine, and entries for the 2015 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize

There have been entries this year from Young Poets from 10 countries for the Young Poets Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine  - from Australia to Canada and the USA. 

You can now hear 2015 Young Poets Judge Simon Rae discussing medicine as a theme for poetry, and the Young Poets Prize, with award co-founders Donald Singer and Michael Hulse. 

In an audio interview Simon Rae notes the emotional response of the poets, and the authority and authenticity in their poetry. He also discusses use of imagery in the poems, and their relevance to a universal audience.

In a further discussion on YouTube, Simon reads extracts from shortlisted poems from the USA and from England.

Simon Rae

Simon Rae is a poet, biographer, broadcaster, playwright and novelist. He presented Poetry Please! on Radio 4 for many years and wrote rude poems about politicians for the Guardian newspaper for even longer.
In 1999 he won the National Poetry Competition after twice coming runner-up. His collection, Gift Horses, was published in 2006. More recently he has written three novels for younger readers, Unplayable, Keras and Medusa’s Butterfly, and his first detective story, Bodyline, comes out in spring 2015.