Poetry in the RCS England Library

The RCS England Library has several poetic and literary works. This is not surprising for a medical library as verses have perhaps always been in the medical arsenal. There is a long history of convergence between medicine and poetry. From the ancient Greek god Apollo, who was associated with Medicine and healing, either directly or through his son Asclepius, but also with music and poetry, to the archaic shamanic figures and the enlightened polymaths of the renaissance and premodernity, there is a long tradition of the healing going hand in hand with other art forms such as verses and poems.

Sir Arthur Salisbury MacNalty (1880 – 1969), medical scientist and medical historian, in his presidential address at the Royal Society of Medicine in 1945, spoke of the influence of medical poets on English poetry. With appropriate flare, he notes: “many of the children of medicine, afflated with the divine fire, tried to express the mysteries of their art in verse and to contribute to the world their salutary songs”. In his 1916 work Poetry and the Doctors, Charles Loomis Dana, physician and professor of nervous and mental disease, lists 154 medical poets. He explains the frequent presence of the physician-poet as a result of the requirement for a good physician to have empathy and imagination. To be able, in other words, to recognise and be emotionally responsive to the fragility and universality of the human experience.

The uniqueness and intensity of being a healer perhaps fostered nascent talents in this area. In the 19th century, John Keats abandoned a career in medicine to concentrate on poetry, while Oliver Wendell Holmes, physician, poet, novelist and polymath, had a literary career alongside his medical career. It is telling that in the 20^th century, once publications of peer reviewed medical journals were established, they often included poetry and literary sections next to research articles, for example The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the British Medical Journal (BMJ), and the Annals of Internal Medicine.

In the context of the Royal College of Surgeons, the Library’s poetry resources include names that are well known among the College and medical circles. There are works by poet Victor Gustave Plarr (1863 – 1929), who was College Librarian for more than 30 years, as well as publications by fellows, doctors and medical practitioners. The College’s biographical series Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows is named after Plarr, who, in 1912, began the process of gathering information for the obituaries. Plarr was a founding member of the Rhymers' Club, a group of London-based male poets, founded in 1890 by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys. Originally a dining club that met at the London pub “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese” in Fleet Street and in the “Domino Room” of the Café Royal, where the group dined and read each other’s poetry, it eventually produced anthologies of poetry in 1892 and 1894. Members included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Richard Le Gallienne, John Todhunter and Lord Alfred Douglas. Oscar Wilde attended some of the meetings held in private homes. An accomplished and well-known poem of Plarr is “Epitaphium Citharistriae”:

"Stand not uttering sedately
Trite oblivious praise above her!
Rather say you saw her lately
Lightly kissing her last lover.
Whisper not, “There is a reason
Why we bring her no white blossom”:
Since the snowy bloom’s in season,
Strow it on her sleeping bosom:
Oh, for it would be a pity
To o’erpraise her or to flout her:
She was wild, and sweet, and witty --
Let's not say dull things about her."

Above: Victor Plarr.

Above: Portrait of Wilfred Blunt (centre) with Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Sturge Moore, Richard Aldington and Frank Stuart Flint and Victor Plarr. © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Among the names that appear in our catalogue are renowned neurologist and poet Henry Head, general surgeon and poet Henry Victor Martin (1811 - 1901), Thomas White Ogilvie who was a doctor, naturalist and poet, and Solyman Brown (1790-1876), American dentist known among his peers as the “Poet Laureate of Dentistry”. His poetic work includes “Dental Hygeia: a poem, on the health and preservation of the teeth”, and “Dentologia: a poem on the diseases of the teeth and their proper remedies” (1833).

There are also the technical medical poets, who used verse to present and talk about medical issues, for example Gerolimo Fracastoro who wrote an epic on “Syphilis, or The French disease: a poem in Latin hexameters”, or Sir Samuel Garth, M.D., who wrote the satire “The Dispensary: a poem. In six cantos”. A very entertaining example of this type of intersection of poetry and medicine is “The Diagnosis of the Acute Abdomen in Rhyme”, published in 1947. This unusual contribution directed to medically-trained readers is a collection of poems of various abdominal symptoms and diagnoses in rhyme. The author is the enigmatic Zeta with drawings by Peter Collingwood. Zeta was in fact the literary alias of college fellow Sir Vincent Zachary Cope (1881 – 1974). The book covers such subjects as appendicitis, perforated ulcer, colics and ectopic gestation with rhymes and imaginative illustrations. For example:

"In listening to the lungs and heart
For they sometimes may lead astray
By pain referred down belly-way
…
The face deceives - in women as in men;
Then, smiling, will the sufferer explain
That he’s a fraud and gone is all his pain.
But not be deceived, Examine by routine
And you will find the signs can still be seen.
…
Now strangulation of a coil of gut
Means that the blood-supply is from it cut."

Above: Sir Vincent Zachary Cope. Image by Speaight Ltd., licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, available from Wikimedia Commons.

Cope was an English physician, surgeon, author, historian and poet perhaps best known for authoring the standard text of general surgery Cope’s Early Diagnosis of the Acute Abdomen (from 1921 until 1971), but he also wrote widely on the history of medicine and of public dispensaries.

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) also has a place in medical history as a poet. The grandfather of naturalist Charles Darwin was a Lichfield-based physician, as well as a medical poet. As a leading physician of his time, with a flourishing practice, he was offered the position of physician to George III, but Darwin declined the offer as he would have had to move to London. The library holds his well-known and lengthy poem “The Botanic Garden”, originally published as “The Loves of the Plants”, which was republished in various editions during his lifetime. It was inspired by the real botanic garden that Darwin established in Lichfield in 1778 and was extolled in its day and translated into French, Portuguese and Italian. His most accomplished work, “The Temple of Nature or the Origin of Society (a poem, with philosophical notes)”, appeared posthumously in 1803.

Above: Erasmus Darwin. Joseph Wright of Derby, Public domain, available from Wikimedia Commons.

Sir Henry Head’s (1861 – 1941) literary contribution is a little known but important part of his career. In fact, we cannot think of Henry Head just as doctor. His interests were wide and embraced art, literature, the stage, music, and indeed, all aspects of human nature. Lord Brain even suggested in his obituary of Head that “had Henry Head not adopted medicine as a profession, he might have been equally distinguished as a writer”.

During World War I, Head published war poems in several literary journals and in 1919 they were compiled into a volume entitled Destroyers and other verses. Below is the eponymous poem, “Destroyers”, from this collection of very personal verse:

"On this primeval strip of western land,
With purple bays and tongues of shining sand,
Time, like and echoing tide,
Moves drowsily in idle ebb and flow;
The sunshine slumbers in the tangled grass
And homely folk with simple greeting pass,
As to their worship or their work they go.
Man, earth, and sea
Seem linked in elemental harmony,
And my insurgent sorrow finds release
In dreams of peace.
But silent, grey,
Out of the curtained haze,
Across the bay
Two fierce destroyers glide with bows a-foam
And predatory gaze,
Like cormorants that seek a submerged prey.
An angel of destruction guards the door
And keeps the peace of our ancestral home;
Freedom to dream, to work, and to adore,"
These vagrant days, nights of untroubled breath,
Are bought with death."

Prior to “Destroyers”, Head published two other volumes of poetry, and in 1922 he wrote an introduction to a collection of works by Thomas Hardy compiled by his novelist wife, Ruth Mayhew. The literary influence between the couple was mutual, as demonstrated by the many references to medicine and physicians in Ruth’s novels.

Above: Henry Head. From: Cross, Kenneth W., Henry Head centenary: essays and bibliography, London, 1961.

Above: Henry Head. From: Cross, Kenneth W., Henry Head centenary: essays and bibliography, London, 1961.

Above: Ruth Mayhew. From: Cross, Kenneth W., Henry Head centenary: essays and bibliography, London, 1961.

Thomas White Ogilvie’s (1861 – 1908) Poems from 1911 is another poetry collection available from the library. Ogilvie was born at Keith, Banffshire, on 23rd January 1861. He then decided to study medicine and entered Aberdeen University. While at university, he maintained an excellent record, and upon graduation he established a successful practice in Torry. Parallel to his medical career he acquired a reputation as an elegant writer, as a versatile lecturer, and as a gifted storyteller. It was during this time that most of his poems were written, and they appeared in local bookstalls and Torry’s evening press.

The library also holds poetry books by non-medical men. Among the items there is a moving posthumous publication by a young poet who died prematurely, John Dawes Worgan (1791-1809). Entitled Select poems, &c / by the late John Dawes Worgan, of Bristol, who died on the twenty-fifth of July 1809, aged nineteen years; to which are added, some particulars of his life and character, by an early friend and associate; with a preface, by William Hayley, it was published in London in 1810. Worgan had a prodigious poetic talent but unfortunately died very young of typhus fever. The editor dedicates the volume to Edward Jenner, Worgan’s “affectionate physician”, who treated Worgan during his fatal illness. Worgan was a tutor to Jenner’s son, and he repeatedly expressed his admiration for the medical man and his service to public health. In the book’s introduction, college librarian William LeFanu explains that Worgan spent time at Jenner’s house under his care and that the two men formed a close bond. Beyond the obvious intersection between Worgan’s life and medicine, the editor was, possibly, hoping that the use of Jenner’s name would help boost the circulation of the “literary remains” of Worgan’s poetic work.

Above: Title page of Select Poems, &C by the late John Dawes Worgan... London, 1810.

This brief excursion around the library poetry collection intends to demonstrate the intersection of medicine and poetry and how they meet through time and inspire each other. More contemporary examples of the doctor-poet are Fady Joudah and João Luís Barreto Guimarães. The latter, a breast cancer specialist and prizewinning poet, is pioneering the teaching of poetry alongside medicine to help trainee doctors with their emotional education, and provide grounding in empathy, compassion, solidarity and all the humanistic values that doctors should strive for in their practice. The history of medicine and surgery is full of examples of its close bond to the humanities and to poetry in particular.

Maria Christodoulou, Information Assistant