Poetry, medicine, and the International Hippocrates Prize.

摘要

In November, 2009, we launched the annual Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, with the inaugural 2010 awards to be presented at an international symposium in early April. Why this focus on what may seem at first sight an unlikely pairing? If we think of medical matters as they are reflected in literature, it is likely that our minds turn first to the doctors who appear in prose fiction, such as Tertius Lydgate, who struggles so valiantly to become established in George Eliot's Middlemarch, or Charles Bovary, who disastrously tries a new surgical approach in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Or we may think of the comic mileage in medical matters discovered by Moliere in The Hypochondriac or A Doctor in Spite of Himself, in which he shows us a man whose reputation for working miracles goes before him, so that he finds it easy to slip into a medical role in which he can deliver delightfully absurd pronouncements such as: "She mustn't die without a doctor's prescription".