Medical themes in the poetry of Dannie Abse

Medical themes in the poetry of Dannie Abse Norman Kreitman There is no necessary connection between poetry and medicine; dockers and draughtsman as well as doctors may or may not write verse. For many a critic engaged in his almost impossible trade, such coincidences of occupation are a boon. For example, any sensitivity is apt to be called a "diagnosis," and there will be much nodding of heads over his clinical acumen, precision of observation, urbanity and so forth. Had Chekhov been, say, a lawyer, a wholly different vocabulary would doubtless be conjured up to describe exactly the same literary qualities, and with as little justification. But conversely there are some writers who happen to be doctors and who choose from time to time to bring their medical experience directly into their creative writing. Such a one is Dannie Abse; here we will be concerned only with how medical topics are worked out in his poetry, not in the prose or plays. These aspects occupy only a small fraction of the work of this gifted and varied poet, but they certainly merit attention. Three themes can be distinguished. The first, which needs only brief consideration, arises in the earlier poems concerned with those problems of identity which beset most young people. For Abse the tensions arose from his being a young man living in London yet carrying within him a vividly Welsh boyhood, and from being a Jew with a strong sense of cultural identity who had rejected the trappings of orthodoxy and lived in a predominantly non-Jewish society. He was also first a medical student, then a young doctor complete with a white coat, whose primary passion was for literature. These dilemmas are rarely mentioned directly. The tensions they engendered were transmogrified and worked out in poems such as "The Trial" and "Duality" from the 1952 Tenants of the House, and overtones of the same theme are to be found in the following volume, Poems, Golders Green published 48 MEDICAL THEMES IN THE POETRY in 1962. In our increasingly pluralistic society most of us have to adapt to a series of alternative identities and no one writer can hope to present more than his own example. A self-image as a doctor happened to be one of the options available to Abse. It is not the partly medical origin of his problem that is now of interest to the general reader so much as the poems in which it was resolved. Nevertheless, the point is worth noting. By 1968 when the next volume, A Small Desperation, was published, a new and more persistent medical theme enters the poems, namely the relationship between the patient and the doctor. Even when it involves the simplest ailment that relationship is highly complex, and has attracted a great deal of research and discussion in the past decade, especially by social psychologists. It may be radically simplified as follows: The patient is a person in distress (usually current but occasionally only potential) who experiences his or her unhappiness in bodily terms and can formulate it in language that embodies physical concepts. Further, he judges himself and his situation to be such that it is appropriate for him to enter the sick role. The doctor, or his or her agent, is also a person, and is socially defined as a healer, or more generally as one who is recognized as the appropriate individual to encounter patients. The meeting itself is further governed by a set of prescribed norms concerning time and place and the conduct of both parties down to the smallest nuance of the interchange. In effect, then, there are four elements; the patient as a person and as the actor in a largely pre-scripted drama, the doctor as a person, and the complementary set of behaviours that make up his professionalism. (We do not, fortunately, have to dissect the complexities that arise when the patient's symptoms are psychological, since Abse is not a psychiatrist but a chest radiologist and physician.) So complex a scheme of things can readily break down, most obviously by the doctor detaching himself too far from the reality of distress by moving off into a position...