These thoughts arise from teaching involving poetry in a humanities selective in the 3rd year of the MBChB degree here at Otago.  I start with a review of various attempts to credit poems with usefulness, a view I've argued against, and say why I'm not inclined to change my mind.  But then, I look at the recent teaching I did, and ask what emerged from that.

I agree, first, that poets do make truth claims (including about truth itself); but I also found myself drawn into the way in which one poem may echo another – a conversation among texts which opens them up to reinterpretation.  For example, I consider a possible conversation between TS Eliot's The Journey of the Magi and Hone Tuwhare's Heemi.  What does this tell us about poetry and its role in medical education?

Speaker: Neil Pickering