Caring for the marvelous and the fragile: shortlists announced for 2018 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

The judges - Carol Rumens from Bangor in North Wales, Peter Goldsworthy from Adelaide in Australia and Mark Doty from New York City have just agreed 4 shortlisted poets for the Health Professional Prize and a further 4 shortlisted poets for the Open Prize. Entries for the 2018 Hippocrates prize were received from 37 countries and from 5 continents.
Competing for the Open Prize are Joanne Key from Crewe in England for Colony, Sarah Ann Leavesley from Droitwich in England for At breaking point, Aniqah Choudhri from Didsbury in  England for Repeat Prescriptions and Raphael Dagold from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan for Pharmacology.
In the running for the Health Professional Prize are Inez Garzaniti from Pontiac in the USA for Cranial Nerve Shadowbox, Stephen Harvey from Nashville in the USA for The Thirteenth Floor, Maria Ji from Onehunga in New Zealand for Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Patient and Emma Storr from Leeds in England for Six Week Check.
Commendations were also agreed for entrants from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, England, Northern Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the USA - 19 in the Open category and 20 in the Health Professional Category.
Judge Carol Rumens said: “A good poem is like a blood transfusion. It replenishes the body of words, the language in which the poem is written. These prize-winning and commended poems sometimes highlight the metaphorical possibilities of a scientific vocabulary: one of the valuable aspects of the Hippocrates Prize is that it encourages such creative cross-fertilisation. But they also demonstrate that the borders stereotypically perceived between art and science cease to matter in the heat of imaginative and lived engagement.“
Judge Mark Doty said: “Caring for the marvelous and fragile thing a human body is, those who work in the healing professions live in intimate relation with what it is to be alive. Every day they face our vulnerability, as well as their own.  That’s why so many have second lives as poets; writing can be a way to keep their own hearts open, giving form to feeling they must often hold at bay while they attend to what patients need.”
He added: ”The humane and moving work shortlisted for the Hippocrates Poetry Prizes testify to the power of poetry to help us to negotiate the difficult. In carefully crafted, artful language, they demonstrate how the wellspring of compassion renews itself In us again and again.” 
Judge Peter Goldsworthy said: ”Sometimes pus, sometimes a poem…but always pain,’ the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote, a near-perfect poetic distillation of the costs of creativity, at least ‘sometimes’    Of course not all great art has its genesis in pain, and not all pain – not even a fraction – leads to the partial consolations of art.  But if lancing an abscess is the surest way to healing,  poetry can  offer that same cleansing of emotional wounds - at least, again, ‘sometimes’.   As can humour;  and jokes are a species of poem, sharing its same search for precision, density, rhythm, timing - perfection.”
He added: ”There are many species of  poem  here - dark, poignant, epigrammatic, celebratory, funny - which caused me many headaches when judging their merits.  How to separate apples from oranges - and grapes, and melons, and durians?   In the end I can only applaud the  endless capacity of  the poets  - and the language -  for creativity, for compassion, for generosity, for courage under fire - and all their various subspecies of humour.”
See more on the shortlisted and commended poets on the Hippocrates Poetry website.

Poetry Foundation, Cbicago

The winners will be announced at the 2018 Hippocrates Awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago from 4pm on Friday 11th May when the Hippocrates Awards Anthology will be launched. There is also a reading at the Poetry Foundation by Mark Doty from 7pm on Thursday 10th May, an accompanying conference on poetry and medicine that morning and afternoon at Northwestern University in Chicago, and a workshop on poetry, medicine and art at Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday evening, 11th May.
With an awards fund of £5500 the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single unpublished poem. The 2018 Hippocrates Prize is supported by medical charity the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine and the healthy heart charity the Cardiovascular Research Trust.
Since it was launched in 2010, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 8000 entries from over 60 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and from Finland to Australasia.
___________________________________________________________________________
Notes for editors
For photos of finalists, biographies and extracts of their poems, call 07494 450805  or email hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com
The Hippocrates Initiative – winner of the 2011 Times Higher Education Award for Innovation and Excellence in the Arts – is an interdisciplinary venture that investigates the relationship between medicine and poetry.
The 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize 
More on support for the 2018 Hippocrates Awards for Poetry and Medicine

The 2018 Hippocrates Open Awards and Health Professional Awards are supported by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. The FPM is a UK medical society founded in 1918, which publishes the international journals the Postgraduate Medical Journal and Health Policy and Technology. 

The 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize is supported by the Cardiovascular Research Trust, a healthy heart charity founded in 1996, which promotes research and education for the prevention and treatment of disorders of the heart and circulation. The charity has a particular interest in avoiding preventable heart disease through educating school students.https://thefpmuk.wordpress.com/

The 9th Annual Symposium on Poetry and Medicine is supported by:

• Center for Bioethics & 
Medical Humanities, Northwestern University 
Feinberg School of Medicine
• Harvard Medical School
• Hippocrates Initiative 
for Poetry & Medicine
• The Poetry Foundation

Hippocrates Book of the Heart launched in Toronto

The Hippocrates Book of the Heart
Edited by Wendy French, Michael Hulse and Donald Singer

ISBN 978-0-9935911-1-2   UK: £12  Ireland: €15  US: $18  CAN: $24  AUS: $24  NZ: $30

Order a printed copy of the book            Order the eBook

 Art installation by Rochelle Rubinstein and Alisha Kaplan


This book, made possible by the generous support of the Cardiovascular Research Trust, brings together eighty contemporary poets of the English-speaking world and a dozen medical experts from around the globe to offer their perspectives on the heart.

Since ancient times, the heart has been understood as the seat of the emotions, of the will, even of the soul. Over time, a fuller medical understanding of the organ has gradually evolved too, with Harvey’s first complete account of the circulation of the blood and the heart’s role (1628) and Dr. Christiaan Barnard’s first successful heart transplant (1968) marking key moments in a history that has given us a much better understanding of our hearts – and how to ensure they stay healthy.

In compiling this book, the editors invited poets around the English-speaking world, both prominent and less well-known, to contribute poems about the heart, written from any perspective, whether clinical or fanciful, medical or metaphorical. Among the poets are Griffin Poetry Prize winners Roo Borson and David Harsent, Forward Prize winners Sean O’Brien, Hilary Menos and Nick Mackinnon, former New Zealand Poets Laureate Elizabeth Smither and C. K. Stead, former National Poet of Wales Gwyneth Lewis, and President of PEN International Jennifer Clement. They are joined by many other distinguished and rising poets, including Robert Gray, John Kinsella, Peter Goldsworthy, Stephen Edgar and Geoffrey Lehmann from Australia; Anna Jackson, Jenny Bornholdt and Chris Price from New Zealand; Grace Schulman, Rafael Campo, Matthew Thorburn, Debora Greger and Jeffrey Harrison from the US; Marilyn Bowering and Kenneth Sherman from Canada; Justin Quinn, Mary O’Donnell and John F. Deane from Ireland; and Jane Draycott, Philip Gross, Mimi Khalvati, Lawrence Sail and Penelope Shuttle from the UK.

Leading medical professionals whose practice and research has led them to a keen interest in the health of the heart contribute information and advice to the book. In clear, crisp mini-essays they illuminate the nature of heart disease, the key risk factors, the history of cardiac surgery, and the most important steps every one of us can take in trying to maintain a healthy heart. Our medical professionals, based in Russia, Finland, The Netherlands, France, the UK, Australia and Hong Kong, agree in their core message: maintaining a healthy heart is possible for every one of us, and is crucial to our overall health and well-being throughout our lives.
The result is that rare thing, a book that satisfies the Horatian dictum that writing should both delight and instruct.

Makom, Toronto, 16.11.17:
Donald Singer, Ron Charach, Kenneth Sherman, Roo Borson,
Kim Maltman, Ronna Bloom and Alisha Kaplan

The Canadian launch of the book was held at Makom in Toronto on Thursday 16th November. The programme included readings by Canadian poets Alisha Kaplan, Kenneth Sherman, Roo Borson and Kim Maltman. There was also a lively discussion panel on "More poetry: just what doctors and the public need?" In addition to the above poets the panel was joined by poet and psychotherapist Ronna and poet and psychiatrist Ron Charach, with a co-chairs: Alisha Kaplan and Donald Singer.

See more about the Toronto launch of the Heart book
 

Ronna Bloom is the author of 5 collections of poetry including The More (Pedlar Press, 2017). Her poems have been translated into Spanish and Bengali, recorded by the CNIB, and used in films, by architects, in education and health care. Her work appears in "Poetry is Public" and in the Toronto Public Library Poetry Map. She is currently Poet in Community at the University of Toronto and Poet in Residence in the Sinai Health System in Toronto. In these roles she offers students, health care professionals, patients and visitors opportunities to articulate their experiences through reflective writing and poetry. A meditator and psychotherapist, she lives in Toronto. 

Roo Borson's work has received the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Award. Her most recent book of poetry is Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar (2017), published by McClelland and Stewart/Penguin Random House. With Kim Maltman, she writes under the pen name Baziju, whose first book, Box Kite, was published in 2016 by House of Anansi Press.

Ron Charach is a poet, essayist, novelist and practicing psychiatrist. Born in Winnipeg, he has lived in Toronto since 1980 with his wife Alice, who is also a psychiatrist and researcher. His medically related poems are featured in two world anthologies of physician poetry published by the University of Iowa Press, Blood & Bone and Primary Care. His most recent books of poetry are Forgetting the Holocaust and Prosopagnosia, the latter of which was published by Toronto’s Tightrope Books. His poetry draws from the twin streams of literature and the healing arts.

Alisha Kaplan: The daughter of a printmaker and a psychiatrist, Alisha is very interested in the convergence of art and medicine, and the healing possibilities of poetry. She is a Torontonian poet, an editor for Narrative Magazine, and the winner of the 2017 Hippocrates Prize in Poetry and Medicine. She taught creative writing at New York University, where she received an MFA in Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Fence, DIAGRAM, Carousel, PRISM, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Kim Maltman is a poet and theoretical particle physicist who teaches mathematics at York University. A past winner of the CBC Prize for Poetry, he has published five solo collections of poetry and three collaborative books, including Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, written under the pen name Pain Not Bread and published by Brick Books.

Born in Toronto, Kenneth Sherman is the author of three books of prose and ten books of poetry. His most recent publications are Wait Time: A Memoir of Cancer and the poetry collection Jogging with the Great Ray Charles.

Donald Singer and Michael Hulse co-founded the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine in 2009. Singer is a clinical pharmacologist who has published over 200 articles, chapters and books on medicines, on cardiovascular research, prevention and treatment, and public understanding of health. He is an editor and contributor to The Hippocrates Book of the Heart (Hippocrates Press, 2017). He co-authors the prescribing safety guide Pocket Prescriber (Taylor & Francis) now in its 8th edition since 2004. He is President of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. He is also on the Executive Committee of the European Association of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. 

Register for Updates on Cancer and Lifestyle on 29th September in London

Medical charity the FPM is organising a one-day meeting on Updates on Cancer on 29th September at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London. 

Register online

Abstract submission online

Consultant Oncologist Professor Robert Thomas will discuss the evidence on benefits of lifestyle and nutrition after cancer, at a one-day meeting on Updates on Cancer on 29th September at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London organised by the FPM.

He said: “With 1:3 getting cancer and 3 million people living with the consequences of this disease at any one time in the UK, and the cost of care increasing, the case for developing effective, self-help initiatives has never been stronger.”

His talk “summarises the international evidence, which shows that physical activity, nutrition and other lifestyle strategies can substantially reduce the risk of relapse and minimise numerous late effects ranging from fatigue, weight gain, anxiety, hot flushes, arthralgia.”

He added that his talk will “highlight the biological processes that take place in the body after a healthy lifestyle, which can have direct and indirect anti-cancer effects. By looking only at the scientific evidence, it breaks down the myths behind which foods to avoid and which to eat more of. It discusses the risks the benefits, of mineral and vitamin supplements and highlights the potential benefits of boosting the anti-cancer polyphenols in our diet. It summarises the results of the world’s largest double blind randomised study of a polyphenol rich food supplement Pomi-T, developed and tested with the help of the UK government’s National Cancer Research Network (NCRN).”

Professor Robert Thomas is a Consultant Oncologist at Bedford and Addenbrooke’s Hospitals, a Professor of applied biology and exercise science Coventry University, a senior clinical tutor at Cambridge University. He is editor of the lifestyle and cancer website (Cancernet.co.uk) and designed the 1^st UK approved qualification in cancer rehabilitation. He wrote the evidence review for the UK’s National Cancer Survivorship Initiative, chairs the Macmillan Cancer Support Exercise advisory committee and directs an dynamic research unit, which has designed numerous studies which been published across the world. For these, and other, efforts to improve the long term wellbeing of patients he was awarded the British Oncology Association Oncologist of the Year, the Hospital Doctor Magazine UK Doctor of the Year and the Royal College, Frank Ellis Medal.

Southampton researcher Dr Lisa Loughney will discuss the benefits of exercise for people undergoing cancer treatment. 

Neoadjuvant treatment is treatment given as a first step to shrink a tumor before the main treatment e.g. surgery or radiotherapy.

In her 2016 paper on this theme she noted that neoadjuvant cancer treatment decreases physical fitness and low levels of physical fitness are associated with poor surgical outcome. She added that exercise training can stimulate skeletal muscle adaptations, such as increased mitochondrial content and improved oxygen uptake capacity that may contribute to improving physical fitness. She has therefore evaluated the evidence in support of exercise training in people with cancer undergoing the “dual hit” of neoadjuvant cancer treatment and surgery.

Dr Loughney works in the National Institute of Health Research’s Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit at the University Hospital of Southampton’s  NHS Foundation Trust.

Wendy French will discuss her Poet-in-Residency year at the UCLH MacMillan Cancer Centre.

Working with patients, sharing in their hopes and fears, tracking the everyday endeavours of a vital medical hub, Wendy French found herself drawn into lives in which blood tests, diagnosis, chemotherapy and hope become as much part of the human experience as cappuccino and Vivaldi on the radio.

Her residency resulted in publication of ‘Thinks itself a Hawk’. In the collection, one life, that of Zipora, a Jewish woman whose origins lay in the darkest days of the twentieth century, is chosen for particular attention for its power to place everyday experience in large frames, but also for the brightness with which it reminds us that everyday life is unique and important.

Wendy French was Poet in Residence at the Macmillan Centre UCLH from April 2014-2015. Her collaboration with Jane Kirwan resulted in the book Born in the NHS, published in 2013. She won the inaugural 2010 Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine prize for the NHS section in 2010 and was awarded the Hippocrates NHS second prize in 2011. She has two chapbooks and two further collections of poetry published, Splintering the Dark (2005), and surely you know this (2009). She previously worked twenty years with children and adults with mental health problems and was head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School. She has also worked with people with aphasia/dysphasia, helping them to recover their use of language through poetry.

This one day symposium will include further sessions on:

• risk factors for cancer
• evidence for effective strategies aimed at preventing cancer
• medical humanities to support patients undergoing treatment for cancer

A turn for the verse: poetry in medical education

Giskin Day spoke on poetry in medical education during the 6th International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine held in London on 22nd May 2015.  

 In her talk, she described initiatives in her own teaching for enhancing reflection and resilience – two qualities that are ‘trending’ in medical education. She also put the case for a third ‘R’: resonance. 

Listen to the talk by Giskin Day on poetry in medical education



Giskin Day said: "Medical education is well known for having a very crowded, fact-driven

Giskin Day

curriculum. Making space for the humanities, including poetry, often is an uphill struggle. Even so, medical schools around the world are realising that reading and writing poetry can develop important skills".

She added "Where reflection requires the distancing mechanism of a mirror, and resilience requires a degree of emotional hardening, resonance unites the rational and emotional in a state of responsive consonance. As a clinical skill, we need to insist on the importance of understanding and developing aurality alongside medicine’s traditional ocular-centricism. 
It is the attentive, empathic listener who establishes resonance with his or her patients. But resonance is also about setting other strings aquiver. Poetry challenges detachment and unites reason, memory and imagination. This allows us to make a strong case for its inclusion in medical education as an intellectual, creative and practical pursuit."

Giskin Day trained as a botanist in South Africa before falling in love with a British species and moving to London. After five years at the Science Museum she moved next door to Imperial College London. She coordinates some 30 College-wide courses in the humanities and teaches science communication and medical humanities. Giskin is an unofficial ambassador for the humanities in the Medical School and frequently is called upon to suggest resuscitation techniques for lifeless teaching workshops. 

She completed an MSc in Science Communication and an MA in Literature and Medicine from King's College, and might soon embark on a PhD on the rhetoric of gratitude in healthcare. She is possibly the only person to have themed her application for senior fellowship of the Higher Education Academy around medical poetry. Imperial is awarding her a President’s medal for outstanding contribution to teaching excellence.

The Symposium was held to mark the announcement of the winners of the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

The Hippocrates Prize is an annual award with a closing date of 31st January 2016 for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize. 

See more about entering for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize.

With a 1st prize of £5000 for the winning poem in the Open International category of

£5,000, £5000 for the 1st Prize in the NHS category, and £500 for the Young Poets Award the Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. In its first 5 years, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 6000 entries from 61 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and Finland to Australasia.  

2015 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine - deadline 31st January

Poetry and medicine features as the theme for an excellent review by Alastair Gee in this week's issue

of the New Yorker. His article ranges from discussion of historical use by Arab physician Avicenna of poetry to aid learning in his treatise medicine – to current interest by medical journals in publishing poetry on their areas of special interest.

The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine features in the article, at £5000 (~USD 7,500) the most valuable international award in the world for an unpublished poem.

Entries have already been received from 20 countries, from Australia to the USA, for the 2015 awards, for which the closing date is 12 midnight GMT on 31st January.

There is also a further £5000 first prize for the Hippocrates NHS prize for the poetry and medicine and £500 for the Young Poets award.

Judges for the 2015 Hippocrates Prize Open and NHS Categories are Poet Rebecca Goss, author, journalist and broadcaster John Humphrys and Psychiatrist Femi Oyebode.

Enter the Hippocrates Awards online

More about the Hippocrates Awards

Read the New Yorker article

2013 Hippocrates Poetry & Medicine Awards Symposium

A great opportunity to spend a day with an international speaker panel discussing the interface between poetry and medicine, at the Wellcome Rooms in London on Saturday 18th May.

Of interest to poets, patients, health professionals, academics and members of the public.

At the end of the symposium, Open and NHS awards for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry & Medicine will be announced by the judges at this 4th International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine.

Register for the whole day or for the afternoon Hippocrates Awards Symposium

Symposium Programme

With a £5000 first prize in each category, this is one of the highest value awards in the world for a single unpublished poem.

More on the awards

The judging panel for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize comprises: Jo Shapcott, winner of the 2011 Queen's

Gold Medal for Poetry, Theodore Dalrymple, doctor and writer, and Roger Highfield, science writer and Executive for the Science Museums Group.

The 2013 judges met in London on 25th March at the offices of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine to agree short-lists for the NHS and Open categories for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

NHS awards

Five poets have been short-listed for the 2013 NHS awards. For all 5 poets, it is their first time to feature within the Hippocrates Awards.

The judges have agreed a further 18 commendations. 12 are new to the Hippocrates Prize. Three have previously won top 3 awards in the Hippocrates Prize and a further 2 have previously been commended by Hippocrates Prize judges. One of this year's featured poets has been commended for 2 of her entries.

Open awards

Four poets have been short-listed for the 2013 awards, 1 from New Zealand, 1 from the UK, and 2 from the USA - one from California and 1 from Massachusetts. For all 4 poets, this is their first time to feature within the Hippocrates Awards.

The judges have agreed a further 19 commendations in the Open category.

Judging for the Hippocrates Prize is anonymous and entries are also presented to the judges in an order that avoids clustering of names of poets.

The 2013 Hippocrates Anthology of the 47 winning and commended poems will be launched after the Awards Symposium at the Wellcome Rooms in London on Saturday 18th May.

Where science collides with life: short-list for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize

Judges Dalrymple, Shapcott and Highfield at short-listing

A Harvard physician, a rising New Zealand Poet, a BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year from Bristol, and a recent Afghanistan veteran are finalists for this year’s Open International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, at £5000 in both Open and NHS categories, one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. Themes ranged from experience of a children’s hospital, to effects of cancer on a friend, the emergency call, and humanity underlying traditional grand rounds.

Now in its fourth year, the short-listed entries for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine have been selected from over 1000 entries from 32 countries by judges distinguished poet Jo Shapcott, psychiatrist and medical writer Dr Theodore Dalrymple, and Roger Highfield, science writer and Director of External Affairs at the Science Museum Group .

Short-listed poets in the Open Category are American Literature expert Liam Corley from California, Harvard Physician and poet Rafael Campo, from Massachusetts, published poet Matthew Barton from Bristol, in England, and poet, writer and former physiotherapist Sue Wootton from Dunedin in New Zealand.

And competing for the UK NHS 2013 Hippocrates £5000 first prize are family doctor Ann Lilian Jay from LLandysul in Wales, former nurse Ann Elisabeth Gray who runs a care home for dementia in Cornwall, poet and novelist Mary V Williams from Shropshire, hospital chaplain Ian McDowell, from London and midwifery senior lecturer Bella Madden from Milton Keynes.

The winners will be announced at an International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine at the Wellcome Rooms in London on Saturday May 18th.

The judges also agreed 18 commendations in the NHS category and 20 in the Open International category –  1 each from from Ireland, Scotland and Israel, 7 from the USA and 10 from the England, from the Isle of Wight to Yorkshire.

Full list of commended poets, with biographies and notes on inspiration for their poems

Judge Jo Shapcott said: 'The Hippocrates Prize, since its inception in 2009, has quickly established itself as one of the most important international prizes for poetry as well as providing a unique place for poetry and medicine to meet.  Its international reach is reflected in this years prizewinners who come from countries all round the globe, including New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, and Israel.“

She added: “You might imagine that poetry on medical themes would be sad, even grim reading, but far from it.  There was a lively range of subjects and perspectives in this year's batch, and the judges were lucky enough to be debating the merits of some outstanding poems which have in common their sheer brio, skill, and passion, and often an exhilarating deftness in deploying medical language so that it sings.”

Judge Roger Highfield commented 'The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine works brilliantly because medicine is where science collides with life. Again and again I found myself transported in mind and spirit to unfamiliar situations where I encountered the memories, experiences and inner emotional worlds of others. I found it enthralling and, at times, disturbing, a powerful reminder of the mysterious way that a few words can herd our thoughts and emotions.'

Judge Theodore Dalrymple remarked “As the Hippocrates Prize once again demonstrates, health care is a fertile source of poetic inspiration. All the poems arise from the need to communicate a deep human experience, and succeed in doing so.”

The awards symposium will consider the relationship between poetry and medicine, with topics including poetry as therapy, using poetry in health professional training, the impact of health and disease on the professional poet and the history of poetry and medicine.

Speakers planned for the awards symposium are from USA, Spain and Switzerland, and the UK.

The Hippocrates Initiative – winner of the 2011 Times Higher Education Award for Innovation and Excellence in the Arts – is an interdisciplinary venture that investigates the synergy between  medicine, the arts, and health.

To attend the Symposium see http://hippocrates-poetry.org

Notes to editors
Photos of all of the finalists, along with biographies extracts of their poems are available on request.

For more information, please contact hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com

Awards: In each category there will be: 1st prize £5,000, 2nd prize £1,000, 3rd prize of £500, and 20 commendations each of £50.

The 2013 Hippocrates Anthology of the 46 winning and commended poems will be launched after the Awards Symposium at the Wellcome Rooms in London on Saturday 18th May. Winning and commended poets are entitled to one free copy of that year's anthology.

The Hippocrates Prize judges

Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions of Rilke, was published in 2001. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the 2011 Costa Book Award. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in December 2011.   Jo Shapcott teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name for Dr Anthony Daniels, who has worked as a doctor in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Gilbert Islands, London and Birmingham, most recently as a psychiatrist and prison doctor. His writing has appeared regularly in the press and in medical publications, including the British Medical Journal, the Times, Telegraph, Observer and the Spectator and he has published around 20 books, most recently The Pleasure of Thinking.

Roger Highfield is the Director of External Affairs at the Science Museum Group. He was born in Wales, raised in north London and became the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. He was the Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph for two decades and the Editor of New Scientist between 2008 and 2011. Roger has written seven books and had thousands of articles published in newspapers and magazines

Hippocrates Prize Organisers

Donald Singer is Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of Warwick, and President of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. His interests include research on discovery of new therapies, and public understanding of drugs, health and disease.

Michael Hulse is a poet and translator of German literature, and teaches creative writing and comparative literature at the University of Warwick. He is also editor of The Warwick Review.

His latest publications are: The Secret History (poems, Arc) and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (translation of Rilke's novel, Penguin Classics). With Donald Singer he co-founded in 2009 the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

2013 Hippocrates Prize is supported by:

The Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine, a national medical society founded in 1918 and publisher of the Postgraduate Medical Journal and Health Policy and Technology, has supported the Hippocrates Prize since its launch in 2009.

The Cardiovascular Research Trust, a charity founded in 1996, which promotes research and education for the prevention and treatment of disorders of the heart and circulation.

The National Association of Writers in Education, which is supporting the new Young Poets category in the Hippocrates Prize.

Heads Teachers and Industry is also supporting the new Young Poets category in the Hippocrates Prize. HTI is a not-for-profit organisation with over 25 years experience of record of working across business, education and government to raise aspirations and employability of young people.

Shakespeare's Medicine Cabinet discussed at the Dana Centre

@HealthMed: Shakespeare’s Medicine Cabinet was the theme of a packed evening session at the Dana Centre on 8^th November. The Dana Centre is funded as joint venture with the Science Museum and Imperial College London, with the aim of bringing together the public with academics and other experts to discuss a wide range of themes.

This evening explored, with the help of the excellent Dana Actors (directed by Silvia Ayguade), facts and fantasy underlying effects of plants as medicines, poisons and aphrodisiacs in Shakespeare’s plays.

Professor Rod Flower FRS selected examples from Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, asking the question whether botanical references were ‘merely dramatic license, or was there a scientific basis for the use of drugs in his plays?’ For example Juliet imploring the Friar:

“… Let me have a dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear 

As will disperse itself through all the veins 

That the life-weary taker may fall dead …”

And the Friar’s offer of a specific death-mimicking toxin to last ‘… two and forty hours …’

Love-in-idleness

The interval was spiced with the opportunity provided by the British Pharmacological Society organisers to sample some of the healthier plants mentioned, including an interesting Heartsease floral tea – the plant referred to as ‘love-in-idleness' by King Oberon in Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Dr Randolph Arroo, Head of Research at the School of Pharmacy in Leicester, went on to discuss the interface between plants and medicines in the second Elizebethan Age.

His comments on reliability of plant sources and earlier issues raised by Professor Flower were echoed in the discussion points raised by a very engaged and informed audience.

For more see the Dana Centre website

and the website of co-organiser the British Pharmacological Society.

Dissociation syndromes - scope for misinterpretations

@HealthMed The complex phrases 'dissociation syndrome', 'extinction syndrome' and 'neglect syndrome' embraces a wide range of categories of altered perception from 'out of body' experience to failure to recognize parts of the body as one's own. Causes may include generalised altered perception in response for example to effects of inflammatory cytokines/toxins/prescribed and recreational drugs. And localised altered perception, typically due to a stroke affecting the pre-motor cortex altering proprioception of the affected contra-lateral part of the body or the visual cortex.

Visual perception may compensate for tactile extinction or neglect however patients with these problems find it more difficult to convalesce, for example in returning to normal physical aspects of daily life from dressing to other complex motor tasks. Physicians need to take care to assess for occult visual or other forms of sensory dissociation (or extinction) syndromes in at risk patients.

Psychotic disorders are a further category, either due to endogenous syndromes or to neuroleptic effects of prescribed or recreational drugs. As a caution for patients and health professionals wishing to know more about the syndromes and their consequences, writers have been attracted to this theme and texts may be misunderstood as literal description, from generalised dissociation, to local abnormal perception e.g. Le bras cassé (The broken arm) by Belgian-born French poet, writer and artist Henri Michaux.

With evolving digital repositories meshed with expert multi-focus editing, it will become possible to provide appropriate 'health warnings' for the patient, health professional or casual reader, explaining the complex nature of the work. However, it would not be surprising to discover works largely of the imagination misfiled in factual medical sections in conventional libraries and bookshops.

It is unclear what inspired Michaux to write on this theme, beyond his personal experience of breaking his arm. Or whether his descriptions and text were influenced by the coincidence of his self-declared experimentation with mescalin and other drugs: through long-term effects on his personal perception of his body or perhaps through use of these drugs during convalescence from his fracture.

International perspectives on poetry and medicine

@HealthMed  The Hippocrates Initiative aims to promote individual, collaborative and interdisciplinary interest in poetry and medicine, both nationally and internationally. 

Professor Anne Hudson Jones from Texas and Professor Hugues Marchal from Basel discuss international and personal perspectives on the interface between poetry and medicine.

Their podcast discussion with Professor Donald Singer, co-founder of the Hippocrates Prize, includes use of poetry as a medium for medical and scientific education, historical use of poetry to provide authority to messages to the public about medicines and other treatments, and inspiration for health professionals and students, and for patients and others to engage in poetry on medical themes.

The discussants were contributors to World Knowledge Dialogue 2012 in Villars where the podcast was recorded.

Their comments provide a broad context for the 4th International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine which is now open for submissions, with a deadline of 31st January, 2013. With a GBP 5000 1st Prize both for its Open International category and for its NHS-related category, this is one of the highest value awards in the world for a single poem.

Listen to podcast

Anne Hudson Jones is Harris L Kempner Professor in the Humanities in Medicine and Professor in the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. She was a founding editor and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Literature in Medicine (John Hopkins University Press), Associate Editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine and has published widely, including a series of essays in the Lancet on literature and medicine.

Hugues Marchal is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Basel University. His research includes major interests in relations between poetry and science from 1800 to the present day. He has taught in the USA at Duke University and Johns Hopkins University, and in Paris at 3-Sorbonne. He has published widely on these themes, including the social context of the times.

More on the 2013 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

Information about 2012 Hippocrates Prize

Podcast of BBC interview with 2012 international Hippocrates Prize winner Mary Bush, Texas.

Lancet article on Poetry and Medicine by Singer and Hulse. The Lancet 2010;375:976-977.

31st Jan deadline for 2013 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

@HealthMed

The deadline for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize is 31st Jan 2013, with awards to be announced at the Wellcome Collection in London on 18th May, 2013.

With a 1st prize for the winning poem in each category of £5,000, the Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. In its first 3 years, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted around 4000 entries from 44 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and Finland to Australasia. Awards are in an Open category, which anyone in the world may enter, and an NHS category, which is open to UK National Health Service employees, health students and those working in professional organisations involved in education and training of NHS students and staff. Co-organizers are medical professor Donald Singer and poet and translator Michael Hulse. 

 The Hippocrates poetry and medicine initiative received  the Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts in the 2011 Times Higher Education awards. This award aims to recognise the collaborative and interdisciplinary work that is taking place in universities to promote the arts. Entries were open to teams and all higher education institutions in the UK. Major support for the Hippocrates initiative has come from the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine, with additional support from the Wellcome Trust, the Cardiovascular Research Trust, Heads, Teachers and Industry and the University Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study.  

The judging panel for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize is now complete: Jo Shapcott, winner of the 2011 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, Theodore Dalrymple, doctor and writer, and Roger Highfield, science writer and Executive for the Science Museums Group.

Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My Life  Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions of Rilke, was published in 2001. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the 2011 Costa Book Award. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in December 2011. Jo Shapcott teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name for Dr Anthony Daniels, who has worked as a doctor in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Gilbert Islands, London and Birmingham, most recently as a psychiatrist and prison doctor. His writing has appeared regularly in the press and in medical publications, including the British Medical Journal, the Times, Telegraph, Observer and the Spectator. His most recent book is The Pleasure of Thinking.

Roger Highfield is the Director of External Affairs at the Science Museum Group. He was born in Wales, raised in north London and became the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. He was the Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph for two decades and the Editor of New Scientist between 2008 and 2011. His most recent book, with Martin Nowak is Supercooperators: Evolution, Altruism and Human Behaviour.


Enter online for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize for poetry and medicine.


More on the International Hippocrates Prize and the NHS Hippocrates Prize for poetry and medicine.