The Hippocrates Book of the Heart edited by Wendy French, Michael Hulse and Donald Singer
ISBN 978-0-9935911-1-2 UK: £12 Ireland: €15 US: $18 CAN: $24 AUS: $24 NZ: $30
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See more photos from the launch
At the book launch of The Hippocrates Book of the Heart in London on Wednesday 6th December 2017. See the programme. This book published by the Hippocrates Press on behalf of the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine, was made possible by the support of the healthy heart charity the Cardiovascular Research Trust.
The book brings together eighty contemporary poets of the English-speaking world and a dozen medical experts from around the globe to offer their perspectives on the heart.
Many of the contributors were in London for the launch of the book.
Publication of the Hippocrates Book of the Heart was supported by a generous grant from the healthy heart charity the Cardiovascular Research Trust.
The CVRT, founded in 1996, educates health professionals, policy makers and the public about effective ways to prevent and treat serious disorders of the heart and the circulation.
Medical Society of London, 11 Chandos St W1G 9EB
Programme
6.00 pm
Welcome: Donald Singer and Michael Hulse
Readings
Co-chairs: Michael Hulse and Wendy French
Audrey Ardern-Jones: Geoffrey Lehmann Alone in the Afternoon
Mike Bartholomew Biggs: Michael Farrell Pope Pinocchio’s Heart
Geraldine Clarkson: Moniza Alvi Red Riding Hood
Martyn Crucefix: CK Stead The angels of science and compassion
Anne-Marie Fyfe: Kenneth Sherman Heart
Michael Henry: Moira Egan Fig 24-1: front View of the Heart
Norbert Hirschhorn: Fiona Moore Fouad M Fouad The Wolf in the Hospital Corridor
Danielle Hope: Paula Bohince Heart
Hubert Moore: Leah Kaminsky Have you noticed
Kate Miller: Matthew Thornburn The Size of a Fist
William Oxley: Elizabeth Smither The heart heals itself between beats
Diana Pooley
Gillie Robic: Rafael Campo Cardiology
Lesley Saunders: Jane Draycott The Skein
Martin Satyamurti: poem by Carole Satyamurti
7.15 pm
Reception
Wendy French won the inaugural 2010 Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine prize for the NHS section in 2010 and was awarded second prize in 2011. She has two chapbooks and two collections of poetry published, Splintering the Dark, Rockingham press 2005, and surely you know this (the title was taken from a Sappho fragment) Tall lighthouse press 2009. Her collaboration with Jane Kirwan resulted in the book Born in the NHS which was published 2013 by Hippocrates press. She has worked for the past twenty years with children and adults with mental health problems and was head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School. She left this post to concentrate on working with people with aphasia/dysphasia helping them to recover their use of language through poetry. She was Poet in Residence at the Macmillan Centre UCLH from April 2014-2015. The collection inspired by this residence - Thinks Itself a Hawk - was launched in April 2016 at the 2016 Hippocrates Awards Symposium held at the Medical Society of London.
Michael Hulse and Donald Singer co-founded the Hippocrates Initiative for poetry and medicine in 2009. Michael Hulse has won numerous awards for his poetry, and has translated more than sixty books from the German, among them works by W. G. Sebald, Goethe and Rilke. His collection of poetry, The Secret History (Arc, 2009), and the co-edited anthology The Twentieth Century in Poetry (Ebury, 2011), brought him invitations to read and talk in Mexico, the US, Australia, New Zealand, and several European countries. He is a permanent judge of the Günter Grass Foundation’s Albatross Prize, a literary award similar to Britain’s Man Booker International. With J. M. Coetzee and Susanna Moore, is an ambassador for Adelaide Writers’ Week. His new book of poems, Half-Life, was published by Arc in August 2013.
Donald Singer and Michael Hulse co-founded the Hippocrates Initiative for poetry and medicine in 2009. Singer is a clinical pharmacologist who has published over 200 articles, chapters and books on medicines, on cardiovascular research, prevention and treatment, and public understanding of health. He is an editor and contributor to The Hippocrates Book of the Heart (Hippocrates Press, 2017). He co-authors the prescribing safety guide Pocket Prescriber (Taylor & Francis) now in its 8th edition since 2004. He is President of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine and is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Association of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. He is chairman of the the healthy heart charity the Cardiovascular Research Trust.
