A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine

by Corinna Wagner (Editor), Andy Brown (Editor)

A Body of Work includes poems by writers from the dawn of Enlightenment to the 21st Century and explores changing attitudes to medicine, health and the body. The book is divided into eight thematic sections, each of which includes a chronological range of poetry and excerpts of important historical and contextual medical writing. The sections

Body as machine
Nerves, mind, and brain
Consuming
Illness, disease, and disability
Treatment
Hospitals, practitioners, and professionals
Sex, evolution, and reproduction
Ageing and dying

Includes work by such poets Dannie Abse, Maya Angelou, Simon Armitage, Margaret Atwood, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, John Burnside, Raymond Carver, Lucille Clifton, S. T. Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Mark Doty, T.S. Eliot, Paul Farley, Ann Finch, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Graves, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ted Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Paul Muldoon, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, John Addington Symonds, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams.

Genres: Poetry, History Of Medicine, Medicine

560 pages, Hardcover

First published May 7, 2015

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great collection.

If you like poetry of the macabre, the morbid, the graphic, and the ick, this is for you. Even if you don't like poetry, if you like any of those other things, this is for you.

A really great collection.

[Rita Ciresi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well conceived and thorough look at how and why poets have viewed illness and mortality. The introduction, written by Dr. Corinna Wagner, provides an excellent overview. Highly recommended for all those interested in the medical humanities.