Hard Words from the WardsImages of Violence and Violation in Hospital Poetry

Poetry by patients that depicts and reflects on hospital experience invites readers to recognize how many procedures deemed acceptable, and even prescribed, by health-care professionals leave patients feeling violated. Such situations are often inherently ambiguous, but some of these accounts urge readers to reconsider what we have normalized and how our collective threshold of tolerance for intrusive, even violent measures may need to be recalibrated.