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This paper explores a relationship between poetry and homeopathy. It proposes we expand and enlighten our knowledge of the patient and develop our consultation through our experience of poetry. Within each consultation is a poem. Heightened awareness of this and many other aspects can improve the sensibilities of the practitioner and enhance deeper healing of the patient. We are challenged to respond.
William Carlos Williams, Pulitzer Prize-winning physician-writer, was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he practiced medicine until he was incapacitated by a stroke at age 68. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Williams trained in New York City and Leipzig, Germany, settling in Rutherford in 1909. Doctor Williams revolutionized American poetry by rejecting traditional conventions of rhyme and meter, and he masterfully used "American" English-brusque, colloquial, and incisive-in his poetry. Williams is recognized as one of the most original poets of the 20th century. His medical life sometimes trivialized, Williams was a serious student of medicine and considered himself "in the front lines, in the trenches." He regarded art and medicine as "two parts of a whole," and the intimate doctor-patient interface proved a powerful inspiration for his writing. Dr Williams was a physician of immense integrity and dedication; he regarded allegiance to humanism as important as excellence in medical science. Prolific in various genre, Dr William Carlos Williams attained belated recognition in spite of astonishing productivity and originality. His stature and influence has steadily increased since his death in 1963, and Dr Williams is now considered "the most important literary doctor since Chekhov."
People with experience as mental health clients, mental health nurses, writers and other professionals have used literature to benefit mental health service users in various ways. These include expressive writing, as well as applications in psychotherapy and counselling and to deal with specific problems and symptoms. In addition, therapeutic story-telling, bibliotherapy and poetry therapy have been used. Various benefits have been described, but some accounts do not include evidence of clinical effectiveness. However, positive treatment outcomes have been reported in research papers and other literature, with particular evidence of clinical effectiveness in some studies of bibliotherapy, therapeutic writing and poetry therapy. Further work is needed to clarify and measure the effectiveness of various expressive and therapeutic uses of literature. The authors also recommend collaboration among practitioners and the need for supporting evidence for proposals for increased resources in this field.
This paper explores one facet of a therapeutic relationship with a woman suffering from inoperable cervical cancer. The psychotherapy sessions were conducted in both hospital and the family home and continued on a weekly basis until final termination immediately prior to the woman's death. Through a "suspense structure' case study narrative, the writer, a nurse psychotherapist, describes the way in which the humanities, art and poetry can provide a means through which to understand seemingly incomprehensible feelings related to reviewing past events as a preparation for death. While no explicit critique is made of the twin psychoanalytical concepts of transference and countertransference, the occurrence is woven into the text. The essential nature of clinical supervision is illustrated in context. The author proposes that engagement in a therapeutic relationship with a dying person presents the worker with parallel struggles manifesting in elementary feelings which require discernment. The central recommendation of this paper is that the rich symbolic language and metaphors, redolent in art and poetry, be harnessed as a potent therapeutic tool. Throughout the discussion, the terms counselling and psychotherapy are used interchangeably.
The prose and poetry of S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914)--related to the American Civil War--encompass a very significant portion of his non-medical writings. The Civil War, more than any other single event, shaped his future career as one of the founders of American neurology. Indeed, it should not be surprising how the war was also such a driving force in his non-medical writings. His novels, once widely read, now are scarcely noted. His accounts of the social, political and economic events of the Civil War are of historical interest to students of the period. Neuroscientists as a group, like others, are apt to be unfamiliar with these writings, with the possible exception of "The Case of George Dedlow." A major purpose of this essay is to introduce readers, especially neuroscientists, to Weir Mitchell's fictional works in which neurological cases so often appear. One appreciates more the medical aspects of his novels, written as they were by a first-hand observer. His non-medical writings, poetry and prose, are to a large extent timeless and can be appreciated by today's readers.
The traditional testing process often is static and intimidating to students and encourages multiple guessing or rote recall of information. To avoid these problems and encourage student creativity and critical thinking, the author developed a test that solely uses poetry. In this article, she discusses the use of poetry to test nursing knowledge.
Teaching students about the experiences of those suffering from chronic illnesses like multiple sclerosis is important to the development of compassion. Because information on the psychosocial impact of chronic illness is scarce; however, new learning sources must be investigated. The author explores the use of poetry as a valuable supplement to conventional learning sources and teaching tools. Suggestions for integrating poetry into the nursing curriculum and evaluating its effectiveness are included.
While the visual arts are often given consideration as an important feature of healthcare environments, the literary arts remain an underdeveloped resource. This article describes recent nurse-initiated developments in Aberdeen which attempt to integrate poetry into the culture of hospitals so that patients, visitors and staff can be involved. In particular, the 'Poem Post' project is described. This project makes a selection of short poems available on postcards in wall-mounted racks within local hospitals, and incorporates a facility for feedback of comments and new poems. Feedback has been generally very positive and over 100 new poems have been submitted to the project. Issues arising from evaluation of the project are discussed, and lessons learnt from the experience are reviewed in order to encourage nurses to consider the possibilities that poetry can offer in the workplace.
Traditional scholarship deliberately avoids homosexism, a scholarly approach offering the opportunity for a homosexual reading, in Frank O'Hara's poetry. As a member of the New York City Movement, O'Hara breaks with conventional poetic and social conventions, discussing homosexuality as a natural form of social interaction. This essay, by way of an intrinsic approach, closely examines homosexual subtexts in his poetry in general, and in the poem "A Step Away From Them" in particular.
17 healthy students provided saliva samples for Immunoglobulin A (s-IgA) assay before and after sessions of either writing poetry or reading magazines (control). Levels of s-IgA increased after the poetry-writing sessions but not after reading.
OBJECTIVE: A brief biographical review of the poet Francis Webb was carried out, with reference to his mental illness and recurring themes in his poetry. METHOD: Material is drawn from a recent biography and the author's personal encounters with the poet. Reference is also made to Lacan's theory of psychosis and Winnicott's construct of the 'transitional object'. RESULTS: The poetry may be seen in part as a transitional object whereby the poet sought to repair deficits in the structure of the self and contain psychotic chaos. CONCLUSIONS: The poems have a beauty and power beyond any psychoanalytic theorising, but may also be read as a vital striving toward self-healing on the part of the poet.
Poetry may be used as a vehicle for self-expression with individuals who have developmental disabilities, even with those who may be only minimally verbal. Poetry by well-known poets may be used to illustrate concepts and to enhance the creative experience. Then, through strategic questioning, participants' ideas are recorded in poetic form. The results may be therapeutic in many ways as well as powerful expressions of human experience.
There is an analogy between a scientific approach to medicine in which the patient ultimately becomes an object of study rather than a whole person, and a post/modern aesthetic in literature in which the subject has little or no agency in a chaotic linguistic universe. Raymond Carver died of cancer in 1988, and in both his pre- and post-diagnostic poetry there is humanistic lyricism that contributes to re-establishing empathic bonds between readers and characters, and to re-humanizing the patient as a whole person in the context of contemporary health institutions. Close readings of poems with descriptions of the autopsy room and of patient-doctor relations bring out the medical humanism in Carver's verse.
Our objective was to study the effects of guided rhythmic speech with poetry, referred to as anthroposophical therapeutic speech (ATS), on binary differential heart rate dynamics (also called musical heart rate rhythmicity or HRR) as well as on classical spectral parameters during the 15 min after a speech exercise had ended. A total of 105 1-h sessions with speech or control exercises were performed in seven healthy subjects, with 15 sessions each. Heart rate was recorded with ambulatory solid state recorders. Sessions were divided into a 15-min baseline measurement (S1), 30 min of exercise and a 15-min effect measurement (S2). The overall binary pattern predominance (PP) as well as the frequency of predominant and cyclically recurrent cardiorespiratory phase locking patterns were calculated from HRR and their changes from S1 to S2 were compared with the changes in low and high frequency heart rate variability. The results showed that: (i) ATS provokes alterations in heart rate dynamics which are different from those after control exercises and which persist at least for 15 min following exercise; (ii) in comparison to spectral parameters of heart rate variability, pattern predominance discloses the effects of rhythmic speech exercises best; and (iii) cardiorespiratory phase locking patterns, which contribute most to the rhythm pattern predominance, are more prominent after ATS.
An aesthetic pattern of knowing involves moving beyond classifications and knowing the whole individual. Students are taught to provide holistic care to patients, but instructors evaluate students primarily from a scientific, empirical perspective. To add balance between the art and the science of nursing practice, students were assigned to write an original poem about their clinical experience in mental health nursing. This article reports a qualitative analysis of those poems to expand the instructors' knowledge of the student experience. Five themes and one consistent pattern were identified. Insights and implications of student poetry writing are explored.
Reminiscing may have therapeutic outcomes for the elderly. In this article, the author describes how nursing students used poetry writing to stimulate reminiscence in group work with the elderly. The outcomes included reciprocal benefits for both the students and the elderly participants.
In this discussion, the author has described a technique used in a pilot study where the research aim was to enhance understanding of nurses and their experiences--an understanding achieved from attention to nurses' expressions in poetry. There is a growing interest in qualitative approaches to the study of nursing phenomena and the development of nursing theory (Simms, 1981; Munhall, 1982; Oiler, 1982; Omery, 1983; Swanson and Chenitz, 1982). In fact, many of the techniques and strategies used by helping professionals to know their clients can be adapted in qualitative research procedures. For persons in the helping professions, a qualitative approach is consistent with the therapeutic process of coming to know a client. Human behavior is understood to be an expression of how individuals interpret their worlds. The task of the qualitative researcher is to capture this very process of interpretation in the subject's words, gestures, expressions, acts, and creations.
The objective of this study was to investigate the synchronization between low-frequency breathing patterns and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) of heart rate during guided recitation of poetry, i.e., recitation of hexameter verse from ancient Greek literature performed in a therapeutic setting. Twenty healthy volunteers performed three different types of exercises with respect to a cross-sectional comparison: 1). recitation of hexameter verse, 2). controlled breathing, and 3). spontaneous breathing. Each exercise was divided into three successive measurements: a 15-min baseline measurement (S1), 20 min of exercise, and a 15-min effect measurement (S2). Breathing patterns and RSA were derived from respiratory traces and electrocardiograms, respectively, which were recorded simultaneously using an ambulatory device. The synchronization was then quantified by the index gamma, which has been adopted from the analysis of weakly coupled chaotic oscillators. During recitation of hexameter verse, gamma was high, indicating prominent cardiorespiratory synchronization. The controlled breathing exercise showed cardiorespiratory synchronization to a lesser extent and all resting periods (S1 and S2) had even fewer cardiorespiratory synchronization. During spontaneous breathing, cardiorespiratory synchronization was minimal and hardly observable. The results were largely determined by the extent of a low-frequency component in the breathing oscillations that emerged from the design of hexameter recitation. In conclusion, recitation of hexameter verse exerts a strong influence on RSA by a prominent low-frequency component in the breathing pattern, generating a strong cardiorespiratory synchronization.