The Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry draws on an international and interdisciplinary selection of authors to ask what the cultures of poetry and medicine may gain from critical engagement with each other, developing a space for cross-discipline inquiry, critique and creative expansion.

This comprehensive Handbook carefully curates a provocative and radical set of essays and creative works by poets, artists, humanities scholars, qualitative social scientists, scientists, writer-doctors, and doctor-poets/ medical student-poets that collectively inquire into the nature of both productive and unproductive relationships of medicine and poetry. Reaching well beyond recent trends in narrative-based medicine, a lyrical approach to medical education and clinical practice is not a luxury or oddity but a necessity, as important to us as biomedical knowledge because such poetics are in turn a core part of biomedicine. Where biomedicine has made huge leaps based on scientific advances, these gains have to be translated into equally ground-breaking social and cultural practices in translation of science to face-to-face encounters. The poetic imagination provides a medium and context for such translation, when ground in the daily realities of medical work. The handbook will explore issues such as how poet-doctors identify with cultures of poetry and cultures of medicine, reconciling these different subjectivities in their daily work; and how poets writing about medicine identify with patient experience, sometimes by writing out their own lived experience as either doctor, patient, or practitioner-patient. It investigates whether and how a poetic imagination can shape the overall vision of a medicine and surgery curriculum, the arc of a heart transplant operation, a first encounter between patient and primary care doctor, the layout of hospital architecture, the way a radiologist looks at slides or a histopathologist at specimens, or the way a medical student approaches her sudden insertion into a critical care team.

Presenting a vision of how poetic thinking might form a medical ontology, this thought-provoking book is an essential contribution for scholars and practitioners from across medicine, healthcare, and the medical and health humanities.