Nostalgia for handwriting: it's love th@ m@ters

Words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. ~ Byron


On a recent vacation, having deliberately divested myself of all digital devices, I experienced once again the pleasure of applying pen to paper and transposing the words in my head into the scrawled combinations of graphemes we call handwriting. There is no describing my satisfaction in filling a page with cursive script, nor the miracle of being able to read it back to myself, especially when about half of the content is in my own idiosyncratic shorthand. Why, then, am I writing about my little ink-stained indulgence in Google Docs, for ultimate posting to my blog?

The commanding presence of computers and their keyboards in my life has left little room for pen and pencil. It's so much easier to martial ideas and manipulate text using software. As it neatly telegraphs itself in German, "Laptop auf, Google an!" The computer facilitates the process of writing, and so much more besides. But like my attachment to printed books and paper manuscripts, the love of handwriting is still there, perhaps fostered by a childhood that knew no keyboarding — I first used a typewriter in high school, and a manual one at that. My school days were marked, and liberally spotted, by old-fashioned straight pens. I still remember the smell of the inkwell on my desk, the feel of my pen's stained cork hand-grip, and the distinctive rasping and scratching of many nibs as my classmates and I learned our ABCs.

Now my work compels me to interact with digital text and images for the better part of the day. Years of typing and mouse manipulation have wreaked predictable havoc on the tendons of my forearms. Writer's cramp was easier to deal with. At this point you are probably expecting a rant against the soulless reign of technology, but I shall have to disappoint. I actually enjoy most aspects of computing, especially the flexibility and maybe-I'll-try-that freedom of word and image processing in all its extraordinary variety. At the same time I have my fond memories of the dull pencils, nib-torn pages, smudges, leaky ballpoints, ink blots, and boo-boos of that older world of paper, not to mention the now antique art of typewriting. Underwoods really have had their day, but handwriting is indispensable it seems. Beyond the intrinsic appeal of calligraphic expression, I find it more practical for the recording of thoughts, the exchange of intimacies, note taking, appointment scheduling, grocery list making, and other obiter scripta. No electronic gadget has appealed much to me as a tool for this kind of task. And who, for instance, would feel truly comfortable emailing condolences to a friend whose parent has died? Whether a sonnet or a laundry list, a written document is a hand-produced, human thing. Writing is something handed down. It is part of our history and our most cherished invention after language itself: the perfect tool to record everything our wagging tongues could come up with, from gossip to the oracles of a god. You could say I have a nostalgia for handwriting.

As a counterpart to my computer use, I have tried for many years to order my life with a Palm handheld; but I've grown weary of fussing with it. I'm tired of flubbed Graffiti strokes and poorly aimed taps. There is the persistent mild anxiety caused by having to remember to sync or recharge the battery. I miss the old standard paper calendar books, not just for the ease of whipping them out and quickly scribbling the information I need to record in them, but also for the satisfaction of leafing through past editions, watching the history of my work life flow by as I turn the pages, reminding myself of important people, conversations, random thoughts, aperçus — all charmingly preserved on somewhat dog-eared paper.

A handheld's calendar cannot reproduce paper's tangible presence. Yes, software is efficient; screen resolution and storage are phenomenal; but my experience has been that, once past, events tend to slide inexorably into virtual oblivion. Months and years moulder into an indiscriminate bog of old data. What is lacking is the rich hermeneutical humus of varying inks or pencil types, pen pressures, private doodlings, coffee spills, annotations, underlinings, paper clip reminders, sticky attachments, crossings-out, etc. of a paper journal. Perhaps a future technology will make my complaint look petulant and uncool. I know that digital equivalents of all the above are available (well, perhaps not the coffee spills). But somehow a computer's clean, smooth surfaces act as barriers, depriving me of the all-important visual and tactile experience of paper. New developments in computer technology will doubtless bring better interfaces. When we get the optimum combination of microprocessor power and improved software, handwriting — although this time on a friendlier and ferociously sensitive digital medium — might become popular again. Who is to say where technological development will take us? It's becoming harder to follow the changes and hence to predict futures. As Wallace McLendon has written:

Ten years ago tracking technology was easier. A technology — like PDAs — flew solo, independent of other technologies, like a bird flying outside of a flock. Now technology is immersed in the flock and the flock moves as if each technology is connected. The pattern of a single technology is not as interesting or revealing as it used to be, even if we were able to extract it from the circuits and chips it shares. ... [F]uture technological innovations will be a flock of technology changes shifting and darting together over time continuous.

The demise of handwriting?
My reflections on handwriting give rise to the following questions: Has the computer led to the demise of handwriting? Is our cultural life diminished as a result? Will this loss also affect our language?

It's obvious that there has been a decline, as linguist David Crystal points out in a recent post, but "demise" is an exaggeration. Handwriting is going to be with us for some time to come. People attach great significance to handwritten documents: their "graphaesthetics" (writing style, paper choice, etc.), and what we can deduce from them about the writer's mood, personality, or status. Analyzing a writer's hand is also of vital importance to literary critics, teachers, historians, psychiatrists, forensic scientists, and the lovelorn.

There appears to be little danger to the English language from the millions of tapping fingers and thumbs out there, although anyone on the grumpy side of the Gr8 Db8 on "txting" may demur. I wrote about the phenomenon of Netspeak last October, quoting Martin Amis' very funny take on male genital insecurity and text messaging in his novel Yellow Dog:

... take my word 4 it, clint, u don't want a bloody great 2l. ... they're overr8ed! i h8 them! & what an un4tun8 effect it has on the ego: ... it's not size th@ m@ters, clint. it's love th@ m@ters.

There is no obvious connection between the loss of handwriting and the formal state of a language, as might manifest itself in such areas as vocabulary and grammar. The issues raised by the potential disappearance of handwriting seem to be more psychological and social than linguistic. The use of handwriting has indeed declined, but the language is alive and well, on our loose lips and on the web. Compared to the sinister euphemisms of Big Media, or the nerve-deadening sloganeering of corporate-speak, the lively twitter of real people is quite refreshing. Texting is often criticized, but is it really the bleak, bald, sad shorthand that some accuse it of being, masking dyslexia, poor spelling, and mental laziness? In fact, the evidence suggests the opposite. The texting system of conveying sounds and meaning goes back all the way to the origins of writing. Far from hindering literacy, texting may turn out to help it. Homo loquens at its best.

Could it also be that blogging as a technology is partially making up for the lack of a thoughtful, personalized graphic medium like the traditional diary? The popularity of blogging and other forms of individual expression online may have something to do with a certain nostalgia for paper and ink. While at present there is no substitute for the ease and comfort of typing (or even dictating) words into a computer, there will always be a place for handwriting. When the technology improves, I shall be happy to take up my stylus and handwrite my memoirs and my villanelles, even letters of condolence, onto a light, solid-state digital tablet. If writing is a labour of love, we shouldn't be too concerned about the tools employed. For it's love th@ m@ters.

In floods of rancid bile o'erflows: the poetry of medicine

evoted to the mystic practice of healing, the priests of Aesculapius chanted their shamanistic verses long before scientific investigation was introduced into medicine. Over the ages poets good and bad (mostly bad) have communed with their medical muse and set down their deepest sentiments in the special language of symbol and metaphor. However halting or quirky their rhyme and metre, no matter the annihilating banality of their theme or the bottomless bathos of their bavardage, the poets of medicine have left their mark. The magic of poesy has cast its brilliant light on the unfairly neglected subjects of dissection and digestion, sanitation and elimination.

Medical librarians have been alert to these alternative interests of the physicians whose massive clinical texts accumulate on our library shelves. Whatever our own personal feelings may be regarding the poetic or other literary effusions of our patrons, we should not fail to add them to our collections. For example, Jack Coulehan, M.D., M.P.H., has recently published Primary Care (University of Iowa Press), a collection of poems written by physicians who reflect in verse on the uncertainty, pain, anger, sympathy, longing, skepticism, desperation, and love they observe in their patients and often experience themselves. Dr. Coulehan has also edited Blood and Bone: Poems by Physicians.

The thin line between good taste and travesty is easily crossed, however, when medicine is the muse. I have taken a particular interest in those poets, whether medically trained or not, who ostentatiously occupy the other side of that significant divide. In this post I have brought together an evocative collection of my favourites.

John Keats, sweet singer of the English Romantics, studied medicine and died young. In the short time he had to compose some of the greatest poems of the English language, Keats perhaps wisely avoided the daunting task of creating odes or sonnets on the spleen or the perils of gossypiboma. Yet he was no stranger to life's vicissitudes, for he watched his brother die slowly of consumption, and himself succumbed to the same illness a few years later:

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies. (Ode to a Nightingale)

For Keats, poetry and medicine could and did share many ideological threads, among them being his theory of "negative capability." It required a certain clinical detachment and strong powers of observation honed by hours of squinting at cadaver dissections to form the basis of that world view. But despite all his concerns about etiolated youth, alone and palely loitering in unhealthy fens and drafty towers, you will find none of Keats' verse below. His negative capability did not extend to meditations on chyle or sexually transmitted diseases. Nor is William Carlos Williams's work represented. Famous for the modernist minimalism so beautifully expressed in his The Red Wheelbarrow, Williams versified little of his experience as a physician. No red gurneys haunt our modern poetic sensibility.

No, the poets here gathered are special. Some were physicians, but most were mere human beings. What brings them together is their intemperate desire to write on medical subjects, an obsession matched only by their want of taste and utter lack of talent. They have experienced the world through the gimlet eye of the surgeon, the peculiar exudations of the funeral parlour, and the horrors of the dentist's chair. They have dropped dripping literary specimens into pails and left ample swatches of gauze after sewing up thoracic cavities. It takes special courage and determination to mount the heights of Parnassus with paeans to ditches, drains, embryos, bloody scalpels, and intestinal flora. Indeed, only the most sensitive of souls could write an elegy on a dissected puppy or a smothered child.

Drawing upon this rich and redolent tradition, the writing of medical poetry continues today. Not content with the themes and visual imagery of traditional English poetry, it challenges our inner eye and nostril with a singular corpus of verse, a very human afflatus that cuts like or can be cut with a knife. As Kathleen Béres Rogers reminds us:

Indeed, one could say that modern-day medical poets and patients repeat the traditionally conceived Romantic project, expressing a “spontaneous overflow” of “powerful emotion, recollected in tranquility”: after the diagnosis, the surgery, the recovery, or the death. Yet by writing their poems, medical poets—now and then—remind us that our bodies also exist as a part of the natural world, defined by both their sublimity and materiality. (Medical poems and the Romantic rise of disciplinarity. Thesis. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil, 2007, p. 151.)

Each year the human body excretes its own weight in bacteria. Here is an earthy subject of a sublimity and materiality perfectly fitted to the imaginative powers of the poets gathered together in this little anthology. How sad that as yet no English poets have applied themselves to this formidable reality of human existence. We are the lesser for it.

The poems and fragments assembled below, spanning a period of many centuries, are arranged thematically. Readers are encouraged to be moderate in their perusal of the collection, for too rich a diet of this poetry of medicine could require the attentions of a physician.


Anatomy

A MOOD OF MADNESS

Two loves found refuge in my happy heart,
One for my bride, one for the healing art;
Each of my spirit claimed an equal part.

But, as my talent rose and waxed mature,
Love for my bride became more insecure,
Love for anatomy more deep and pure.

She was a subject to my eyes alone;
Not woman, forsooth, but so much flesh and bone,
Sinew, and blood, and skin, which were my own.

And I had lawful right, with foul intent,
I who for progress on this sphere was sent,
To use her body for experiment.

So in her wine I dropped consuming blight,
One moaning, shadow-haunted winter night,
And, watching, clutched my scalpel's handle tight.

Then, ere her eyes, that agony expressed,
Had closed forever, with impatient zest,
My hands were red dissecting her white breast.

Francis Saltus Saltus (1849-1889)



AN ELEGY TO A DISSECTED PUPPY

Sweet Dog! now cold and stiff in death,
What cruel hand enticed thee here?
Did toothsome crust of juicy bone
Allure to stretch on thy bier?

... ruthless hands of alien race
Are opening up thy quiet breast,
With prying eyes they peer within,
Explore the contents of thy chest.

Georgia Bailey Parrington (fl. 1907)



from THE COURSE OF TIME, Bk. VII

And as the anatomist, with all his band
Of rude disciples, o'er the subject hung,
And impolitely hewed his way, through bones
And muscles of the sacred human form,
Exposing barbarously to wanton gaze
The mysteries of nature, joint embraced
His kindred joint, the wounded flesh grew up,
And suddenly the injured man awoke
Among their hands, and stood arrayed complete
In immortality—forgiving scarce
The insult offered to his clay in death.

Robert Pollock (1798-1827)


MRI

In this image

Of your brain
I see each curve
In the corpus callosum,
Curlicues of gyri,
Folding of fissures,
Sinuous sulci,
Mammillary bodies,
Arcuate fasciculus,
Angular gyrus,
Tracts and nuclei,
Eyes and ears,
Tongue and phalanx.

But not even
A single syllable
Of one
Tiny
Poem

Vernon Rowe. In: Angela Belli and Jack Coulehan, eds. Blood and Bone: Poems by Physicians (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), p. 102.



Dentistry

Stranger! Approach this spot with gravity!
John Brown is filling his last cavity.

Anonymous


MY LAST TOOTH

You have gone, old tooth,
Though hard to yield,
You have long stood alone,
Like a stub in the field.

Farewell, old tooth
That tainted my breath,
And tasted as smells
A woodpecker's nest


from THE DENTIAD

... her lips disclosed to view,
Those ruined arches, veiled in ebon hue,
Where love had thought to feast the ravished sight
On orient gems reflecting snowy light,
Hope, disappointed, silently retired,
Disgust triumphant came, and love expired!

When'er along the ivory disks, are seen,
The filthy footsteps of the dark gangrene;
When caries come, with stealthy pace to throw
Corrosive ink spots on those banks of snow—
Brook no delay, ye trembling, suffering Fair,
But fly for refuge to the Dentist's care.

Solyman Brown (1790-1876)



Dermatology

A PRETTY GIRL

On her beautiful face there are smiles of grace
That linger in beauty serene,
And there are no pimples encircling her dimples,
As ever, as yet, I have seen.

J. Gordon Coogler (1865-1901)



Emergency Medicine

from A TALE OF THE SEA

'Twas on the 8th April, on the afternoon of that day,
That the little village of Louisberg was thrown into a wild state of dismay,
And the villagers flew to the beach in a state of wild uproar,
And in a dory they found four men were cast ashore.

Then the villagers, in surprise, assembled about the dory,
And they found that the bottom of the boat was gory;
Then their hearts were seized with sudden dread,
When they discovered that two of the men were dead.

And the two survivors were exhausted from exposure, hunger, and cold,
Which caused the spectators to shudder when them they did behold ...

They were carried to a boarding-house without delay,
But those that were looking on were stricken with dismay,
When the remains of James and Angus M'Donald were found in the boat,
Likewise three pieces of flesh in a pool of blood afloat.

Angus M'Donald's right arm was missing from the elbow,
And the throat was cut in a sickening manner, which filled the villagers' hearts with woe,
Especially when they saw two pieces of flesh had been cut from each thigh,
'Twas then the kind-hearted villagers did murmur and sigh.

William McGonagall (1830-1902)



Epidemiology

ODE TO A DITCH

Oh, ditch of all ditches,
Death's store-house of riches,
Where wan disease slumbers mid festoons of slime!
Oh, dark foetid sewer
Where death is the brewer
And ail is the liquor he brews all the time!

Oh, hot-bed of fever,
That fatal bereaver
Whose fiery breath blights the blossom of life!
Oh, palace of miasm
Whose hall is a chasm
Where pestilence revels and poison is rife!
...

Oh, wonderful sewer,
Each year brings a newer
And ghostlier charm to they cavernous deeps!
More puppies and cats,
To say nothing of rats,
And offal and filth of all manner in heaps.

Anonymous. Originally appeared in the Fayetteville North Carolinian on February 21, 1857.



Gastroenterology

from THE ART OF PRESERVING HEALTH, BOOK II

The languid stomach curses e'en the pure
Delicious fat, and all the race of oil:
For more the oily aliments relax
Its feeble tone; and with the eager lymph
(Fond to incorporate with all it meets)
Coyly they mix, and shun with slipp'ry wiles
The woo'd embrace. Th'irresoluble oil,
So gentle late and blandishing, in floods
Of rancid bile o'erflows: what tumults hence,
What horrors rise, were nauseous to relate.
Choose leaner viands, ye whose jovial make
Too fast the gummy nutriment imbibes.

...

Half subtilis'd to chyle, the liquid food
Readiest obeys th'assimilating powers;
And soon the tender vegetable mass
Relents . . . .
The stomach, urged beyond its active tone,
Hardly to nutrimental chyle subdues
The softest food: unfinished and depraved,
The chyle, in all its future wand'rings, owns
Its turbid fountain; not by purer streams
So to be cleared, but foulness will remain.

John Armstrong (1709-1779)



Infectious Disease

from POOR LITTLE HEARTS

Poor little Ada Queetie has departed this life,
Never to be here no more,
No more to love, no more to speak.

Poor little Ada Queetie's last sickness and death,
Destroyed my health at an unknown rate,
With my heart breaking and weeping,
I kept the fire going night after night, to keep poor little dear warm,
Poor little heart, she was sick one week
With froth in her throat,
Then 10 days and grew worse, with dropsy in her stomach,
I kept getting up nights to see how she was.

She was coming 9 years of age, when she was taken away,
By all I found out, very certain true
Poor Sissy hatched her out her egg in Chilmark,
The reason she was taken away before poor Sissy,
Her constitution was as weak as weak could be.

Her complaint that caused her death,
Was just such a complaint as poor Sissy had
Only poor Sissy's complaint ended with dropsy in her stomach.

Nancy Luce (fl. 1860s)



Internal Medicine

from THE SPLEEN

I always choose the plainest food
To mend viscidity of blood.
Hail! water gruel, healing power,
Of easy access to the poor;
Thy help love's confessors implore,
And doctors secretly adore:
To thee I fly, by thee dilute—
Through veins my blood doth quicker shoot;
And by swift current throws off clean
Prolific particles of spleen.

Matthew Green (1697-1737)



Obstetrics

Gooing babies, helpless pygmies,
Who shall solve your Fate's enigmas?

from The Light-Bearer of Liberty, by J.W. Scholl (A pathetic attempt at rhyme by a very bad poet)


BETWEEN OUR FOLDING LIPS

Between our folding lips
God slips
An embryon life, and goes;
And this becomes your rose.
We love, God makes: in our sweet mirth
God spies occasion for a birth.
Then is it his, or is it ours?
I know not—He is fond of flowers.

T.E. Brown (1830-1897)



Ophthalmology

ONLY ONE EYE

Oh! she was a lovely girl,
So pretty and so fair,
With gentle, lovelit eyes,
And wavy, dark-brown hair.

I loved the gentle girl,
But oh! I heaved a sigh,
When first she told me she could see
Out of only one eye.

But soon I thought within myself,
I'd better save my tear and sigh,
To bestow upon some I know,
Who has more than one eye.

She is brave and intelligent,
Too she is witty and wise,
She'll accomplish more now, than many,
Who have two eyes.

Ah! you need not pity her,
She needs not your tear and sigh,
She makes good use, I tell you,
Of her one remaining eye.

Lillian E. Curtis (fl. 1870s)



Orthopedics

WOODEN LEG

Misfortune sometimes is a prize,
And is a blessing in disguise;
A man with a stout wooden leg,
Through town and country he can beg.
...

And when he only has one foot,
He needs to brush only one boot;
Through world he does jolly peg,
So cheerful with his wooden leg.

In mud or water he can stand
With his foot on the firm dry land,
For wet he doth not care a fig,
It never hurts his wooden leg.

No aches he has but on the toes
Of one foot, and but one gets froze;
He has many a jolly rig,
And oft enjoys his wooden leg.

James Macintyre (1827-1906). A Canadian noted for another immortal poem, Ode on the Mammoth Cheese.



Pediatrics (Psychiatry?)

HIS MOTHER DRINKS

Within a London hospital there lies,
Tucked in his cot,
A child with golden curls and big blue eyes.
The night is hot,
And though the windows in the long low ward
Are open wide,
No breath of air comes from the sun-baked yard
That lies outside.

A kindly nurse who sees his wistful smile,
To cheer him cries;
"The doctor says that in a little while
He'll let you rise,
And send you home again!" His eyes grow dim.
She little thinks
What since his father died home means to him—
His mother drinks!


TWO SMOTHERED CHILDREN

Theirs was not the peaceful death-bed,
Where affection's silent tears,
O'er the couch of pain fast falling,
Blend with deep responsive prayers;

Nay, their death was strangely fearful!
No fond parent closed their eyes,
And no voice of pity answer'd
To their feebly moaning cries!

Mrs. Marion Albina Bigelow (fl. 1850s)



Public Health

COME BACK CLEAN

This is the song for a soldier
To sing as he rides from home
To the fields afar where the battles are
Or over the ocean's foam:
"Whatever the dangers waiting
In the lands I have not seen,
If I do not fall—if I come back at all,
Then I will come back clean.

"I may lie in the mud of the trenches,
I may reek with blood and mire,
But I will control, by the God in my soul,
The might of my man's desire.
I will fight my foe in the open,
But my sword shall be sharp and keen
For the foe within who would lure me to sin,
And I will come back clean."

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)


LONDON

Magnificent, too, is the system of drains,
Exceeding the far-spoken wonders of old:
So lengthen'd and vast in its branches and chains,
That labyrinths pass like a tale that is told:
The sewers gigantic, like multiplied veins,
Beneath the whole city their windings unfold,
Disgorging the source of plagues, scourges, and pains,
Which visit those cities to cleanliness cold.
Well did the ancient proverb lay down this important text,
That cleanliness for human weal to godliness is next.

Samuel Carter (fl. 1848-1851)



Surgery

from THE SURGEON'S KNIFE

There are hearts—stout hearts,—that own no fear
At the whirling sword or the darting spear,—
that are ready alike to bleed in the dust,
'Neath the sabre's cut or the bayonet's thrust;
They heed not the blows that Fate may deal,
From the murderer's dirk or the soldier's steel:
But lips that laugh at the dagger of strife
Turn silent and white from the surgeon's knife.

It shines in the grasp—'tis no weapon for play,
A shudder betrays it is speeding its way;
While the quivering muscle and severing joint
Are gashed by the keen edge and probed by the point.
Dripping it comes from the cells of life,
While glazing eyes turn from the surgeon's knife.

Eliza Cook (1818-1889)


from THE AVENGER

[A brigand is overpowered in the act of attempting to molest a lady and requires medical care:]

So stunned, surrounded and beset,
The surgeon struggled hard to see
His patient, or at least to get
Some signs of his proximity:
At length they opened up a way
To where a man extended, lay,
Presenting an appalling sight
Seen dimly through the chequered light...
For swelling, high amid the clothes,
The body, like a mountain rose
That scarce the head was seen;
While from below the feet protrude
(Like Satan "stretching many a rood"
So giant-like I ween.) —
And on those large and naked feet
A pair of antique spurs were placed,
Which fastened o'er the instep meet,
With many-coloured latchets graced.

[The surgeon enquires later:]

"Since when he has," (replied the nurse,)
"Been going on from bad to worse."


Samuel Carter (fl. 1848-1851)



Physicians

ON DR. ISAAC LETSOME

When people's ill they comes to I,
I physics, bleeds, and sweats 'em.
Sometimes they live, sometimes they die;
What's that to I? I Letsome.


ON SIR JOHN HILL, M.D., PLAYWRIGHT

For physic and farces his equal there scarce is;
His farces are physic; his physic a farce is.

David Garrick


from ODE UPON DR. HARVEY

Coy Nature (which remain'd, though aged grown,
A beauteous virgin still, enjoy'd by none,
Nor seen unveil'd by any one),
When Harvey's violent passion she did see,
Began to tremble and to flee,
Took sanctuary, like Daphne, in a tree:
There Daphne's lover stopt, and thought it much
The very leaves of her to touch,
But Harvey, our Apollo, stopt not so,
Into the bark and root he after her did go.

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)



In closing

And now, kind friends, what I have wrote,
I hope you will pass o'er,
And not criticize as some have done,
Hitherto herebefore.

Julia A. Moore (1847-1920) "The Sweet Singer of Michigan."