Poetry and Medicine from Antiquity to the Modern Age

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What shall I say, because talk I must? That I have found a cure for the sick? I have found no cure for the sick but this crooked flower which only to look upon all men are cured. (Excerpt from "The Yellow Flower" in Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) by poet and physician William Carlos Williams.) The ancient Greek word for poet was poetes (ποητής), meaning at once author and maker. It comes from the root poein (ποεῖν), to make or create, and this root is still used extensively in medicine: haemopoiesis, for example, refers to the creation of blood cells in bone marrow. The Greek poet was a maker in a divine sense—someone with a connection to the gods (or indeed a god themselves, as some claimed). Through this divine connection poets accessed truths about nature, the body and mind, and the principles of heath and disease. With economic, cultural, and political changes the types of knowledge conveyed via poetic writing versus medical writing became distinct. Natural philosophy—the basis of medical knowledge—was set in opposition to poetry. Knowledge of the body and the principles of health and disease were to be transmitted in prose, not verse; dialectic and scientific reasoning, not poetic inspiration, were the means of both discovering and conveying truths about nature and the corporeal body. In this course we will investigate shifting notions of what it means to be healthy and to be sick through the (at times overlapping) roles of the poet and the physician, together with the evolving kinds of writing and language used by each. We will map ever-changing ideas about the relationship between the mind and the body, that of health and the passions, as well as the interventions on health (or sickness) that literature and medicine were, according various historical vantage points, each able to accomplish.