The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry and the Medical Humanities by Johanna Emeney

Author:Johanna Emeney [Emeney, Johanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783838269382
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Published: 2017-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

you said to me, I wouldn’t call it

an illness. It’s just wear and tear.

Six years of medical school

and yet I was mute. (8, lines 12–16)

The words “disease” and “illness” are avoided by the “you” of the poem, the grandfather; truth is eschewed in favour of the subjective and euphemistic “wear and tear” which makes something less frightening of his decline, and the doctor/granddaughter can say nothing despite her better knowledge. Her ‘muteness’ is inextricably bound to the personal: this is not the place or situation in which to employ clinical, institutional language. Again, silence seems to be a sanctuary.

In the same poem, it is made clear that the speaker knows what course her grandfather’s disease will take, but keeps this knowledge to herself. Silently, she reflects on her professional experience of similar clinical scenarios:

I thought of men I had known

who said the same thing

men whose bodies

emptied out like bathwater. (8, lines 17–20)

This poem places the speaker firmly at the heart of the family, choosing personal language and compassionate silence over medical exactitude or soothsaying. Her position as a person of two discourses, her primary lifeworld discourse and the assimilated specialist discourse of medicine, causes an internal conflict that must be considered and resolved. In this situation, she sees the biomedical, clinical mode as inappropriate.

However, Andrews also recognises the place of medical imagery and language in the description of personal medical experience, and how it can add to one’s apprehension of complex biological processes. This is particularly evident in the poems in the second half of Echolocation, tracing the development of a baby, and written over the course of the author’s two pregnancies (Liang 2008, par. 5). The eponymous poem “Echolocation” (2007, 7), describes the way in which an ultrasound device locates a foetus in utero, relaying a picture to the prospective parents. An amalgam of medical fact and more personal language is used to explain the baby’s image on the sonogram: “We find you there / in the dark […] and the distance / between two poles / tells us when to expect you” (lines 1–2, 9–11). In her appreciation of the child growing month by month, Andrews combines medical knowledge and diction with figurative images of the known world. The “poles” (line 2) are the measuring lines used by the sonographer. They are also metaphorical markers of how far away the birth seems from the present time—the two are perceived as “poles apart.” Additionally, the “poles” (line 2) are part of the foundations of a new life, contributing to the pervasive image of the baby as building or construct. In another example, the baby grows according to an architect’s design, with the necessary “vaults and arches, / bridges, pillars / and harbours” (lines 10–12). The baby is more than genetic fact—it is mysterious and other-worldly, a destination “mapped / by the pencil of a god / or stumbled upon by chance” (lines 13–15) and the image of a building is used once more in the poem “Nine Months” (Andrews

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