From the British Medical Journal (subscription required)….
The Hippocrates Prize is an annual prize for poetry, awarded since 2010 and open to anyone who works, or has worked, in the NHS. There is also a category for poetry about a medical subject, open to anyone in the world writing in English. Altogether there are thousands of entries and the winning poems, the two runners up, and all the commended poems, are published in a slim but elegant volume. It is rather difficult to imagine a poetry prize open to people who have worked in accountancy, or to anyone who has filled out an income tax form, attracting quite so many entries as this one.
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The power of poetry to concentrate and compress emotion is illustrated in a poem by Frances-Anne King about the wig of a child treated for leukaemia with chemotherapy. The wig is discarded as the child lies dying:
Her scalp shone smooth then,
translucent as the linings of an oyster shell,
her freckles, pale tracings on a fading sea of face.
Please don’t publish this comment. It’s just to let you know that there’s an article up here which I don’t believe you know about:
http://salisburyreview.co.uk/linkclaim.html
Another ‘Between the Lines’ article on the BMJ:
Entitled: A call for convalescence
In theory I am in favour of idleness, for without it there can be no contemplation, and without contemplation there can be no wisdom. But good as I was in my youth at being idle, I now find it difficult in practice to be idle. There is, besides, the difficult question of just how idle one should be, and for how much of the time; like many a joy, that of idleness quickly palls.
http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e8337