Born in 1923, Abse is a retired chest physician famous for his poetry. He is the author of a long list of books and lives in the US.

‘His lifetime work as a doctor has given him a grounding in human frailty and reality that many poets lack’ (www.contemporarywriters.com/authors) 

A Welsh Jew who trained and lived in London, his heritage is clear in his poetry:

Case History

'Most Welshmen are worthless,
an inferior breed, doctor.'
He did not know I was Welsh.
Then he praised the architects
of the German death-camps--
did not know I was a Jew.
He called liberals, 'White blacks',
and continued to invent curses.

When I palpated his liver
I felt the soft liver of Goering;
when I lifted my stethoscope
I heard the heartbeats of Himmler;
when I read his encephalograph
I thought, 'Sieg heil, mein Fuhrer.'

In the clinic's dispensary
red berry of black bryony,
cowbane, deadly nightshade, deathcap.
Yet I prescribed for him
as if he were my brother.

Later that night I must have slept
on my arm: momentarily
my right hand lost its cunning.

 

Consider: How important is tolerance of other’s viewpoints in medical practice?

     How does one go about becoming tolerant of one’s patients?

 

Here’s a terrific spooky story, should you like that sort of thing… 

 

In the theatre 

(a true incident) 

Only a local anaesthetic was given because of the blood-pressure problem. The patient, thus, was fully awake during the operation. But in those days, in 1938, in Cardiff, when I was Lambert Rogers’ dresser,- they could not locate a brain tumour with precision. Too much brain tissue was destroyed as the surgeon crudely searched for it, before he felt the resistance of it…all somewhat hit and miss. One operation I shall never forget…

                                    (Dr Wilfred Abse)

 

Sister saying- ‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’

sister thinking – ‘Only two more on the list,’

the patient saying- ‘Thank you. I feel fine’;

small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,

though, soon, he would blink again and again

because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,

rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain.

 

If items of horror can make a man laugh

then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth

still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time;

more brain mashed because of the probes’ braille path;

Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still;

his dresser thinking ‘Christ! Two more on the list,

a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’

 

Then suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,

a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod,

leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’-

the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain,

the patients eyes too wide, and, shocked,

Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe

with nurses, sister, students petrified,

 

‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’

that voice so arctic and that cry so odd

had nowhere else to go- till the antique

gramophone wound down and the words began

to blur and slow,’…leave …my…soul…alone…’

to cease at last when something other died.

And silence matched the silence under snow.

 

 

 

Abse has said that ‘Poetry shouldn’t be an escape from reality, rather an immersion in reality’, and noted that few doctor-poets can sustain both professions: he believes because the poet has ‘too much empathy with creatures and things to become a good doctor’. 

At school he didn’t like poetry. It was polemical left-wing poetry, in his brother’s pamphlets on Franco’s 1937 Spanish civil war, that set him going. Another brother put his name down for medical school. Abse claims he was a hopeless student. 

Complimented on his reassuring honesty, and asked ‘what is the essential quality of a poet?’ he replied ‘Don’t know’. 

Further reading and references  

‘White Coat: Purple Coat: Collected Poems 1948-88’  

www.contemporarywriters.com/authors 

Penguin Modern Poets Vol 26 1975 pp63-4 

http://lidiavianu.scriptmania.com/dannie-abse.htm  Incidentally this is a good example of a bad interview.