Doctors of Verse

A surprising number of good poets have been doctors, and a surprising number of good doctors have been fair (or entertainingly poor) poets. These two facts are demonstrated by an anthology of verse by doctors, Poet Physicians (C. C. Thomas, $5), published last week.

Almost everyone who has read The Chambered Nautilus knows that the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes was a doctor. But not many know or remember that John Keats, Oliver Goldsmith, Friedrich Schiller, Tobias Smollett, George Crabbe, Robert Bridges, Francis Thompson, and Lieut. Colonel John McCrae (In Flanders Fields) were also medical men. So was Thomas Dunn English, the man who wrote Ben Bolt. Most of these writers were doctors only incidentally, and almost none of their poems in the anthology refer to medicine (exception: Holmes's The Morning Visit).

Symptoms In Rhyme. In contrast, the men who were doctors first and poets afterward were very prone to put medicine into verse.

P: The custom of describing symptoms and treatment in verse persisted until books were common; tests in verse were easy to remember. Some 12th-Century medical advice from Italy's School of Salerno:

When mou'd you find yourself to nature's needs, Forbeare them not, 'for that much danger breeds.

P:Some dropsy symptoms from Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden:

, . .Bolster'd with down, amid a thousand wants, Pale Dropsy rears his bloated form, and pants; "Quench me, ye cool pellucid rills," he cries, Wets his parched tongue and rolls his hollow eyes.

Some contemporary doctor-poets write as readily of medicine as of anything else, notably William Carlos Williams and Merrill Moore, a major in the Army Medical Corps. Says Moore:

Doctors must die, too; all their knowledge of Digitalis, adrenaline, henbane, Matters little if death raps again-- Once he may be forestalled, but their great love Or little love of life is merely human: Doctors must die like other men and women.

Ellis In, Osier Out. Most of the verse Anthologist McDonough found was very bad indeed: she left out 20 poor poems for every good or fair one she put in. Such doctors as Edward Jenner (vaccination pioneer) and Havelock Ellis made the grade, but a list of all the doctor-poets the anthologist uncovered shows that such poetasters as William Harvey. Hippocrates, Sir William Osier, Rabelais and Morris Fishbein failed to satisfy Mrs. McDonough's critical taste. Nonetheless, a lot of doggerel got in. One of the most amusing contemporary specimens is John Fallon's Inscription for an Old Well:

There was the privy, there the porkers' . pen. Here was the well, and through this mossy head Uprose the bucket, stately, oaken, red To slake the hearty thirsts of lusty men. Hardboiled, our sires. Their water should have been.

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