St Mary’s Bioethicist to Deliver Consortium Lecture

The use of poetry in teaching healthcare professionals is to be discussed by a leading academic from St Mary’s University, Twickenham at a forthcoming bioethics conference. Dr Trevor Stammers, Programme Director in Bioethics and Medical Law, is to contribute to the discussion on engaging the humanities in bioethics education at the 2014 Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education in Paris from 23rd to 25th June. Academics and speakers from across the world will gather at the three-day consortium with a line-up of 33 speakers from eight nations, including Dr Stammers, as the speaker from the UK. Speaking about his lecture Dr Stammers said, “For many years, both film and literary fiction have been widely used in teaching medicine, including biomedical ethics and there are many articles and books on this now. There are, however, very few articles and no books on poetry as a teaching medium in medicine, yet poetry concentrates communication into fewer words than prose, and healthcare professional need to be able to communicate concisely to patients and also to pick up on often quite small cues in the patient’s language or paralanguage. “Poetry can be very effective in practising the art of discerning meaning in word choice and entering into the heart of patients’ inner worlds. I will be exploring these issues using examples of poems about psychiatric treatment and the experience of infertility.”