As part of the Healthy Heart Trust’s founder Professor Donald Singer’s historic engagement at the intersection of medicine, literature and poetry, numerous publications went to press.
‘Storm Brain – The Hippocrates Book of the Brain’
Storm Brain was edited by Donald Singer, Wendy French and Michael Hulse, and its publication made possible thanks to the support of the Healthy Heart Trust.
This companion volume to the earlier Hippocrates Book of the Heart was published in December 2021, with a medical launch as part of the Updates on Stroke webinar in December 2021, with special readings by 43 of the poets featured in the same month.
Leading medical professionals, whose practice and research around the world has led them to a keen interest in stroke, contribute information and advice to help every one of us understand and avert stroke or manage its consequences.
Already understood by Plato as the seat of thought and analysis, the brain has been an object of scientific study at least since the days of the ancient Egyptians. In recent times, the impressive advances of neuroscience have given us modern brain surgery and a growing understanding of the nature of stroke and dementia. At the same time, millions worldwide experience either in themselves or in loved ones the ravages wrought on the individual when the brain suffers an attack.
The editors invited poets around the world to donate poems on the subject of the brain and its afflictions. Among the poets in this book are Roo Borson and Kim Maltman, Peter Goldsworthy, Elizabeth Smither, Mimi Khalvati, Gwyneth Lewis, Jeffrey Harrison, Marilyn Bowering, Mary O’Donnell, Lawrence Sail, Claire Trévien, Philip Gross and C. K. Stead.
The Hippocrates Book of the Heart
The Hippocrates Book of the Heart was published in 2017 and was edited by Donald Singer, Wendy French and Michael Hulse, and its publication made possible thanks to the support of the Healthy Heart Trust.
Since ancient times, the heart has been understood as the seat of the emotions, of the will, even of the soul. A fuller medical understanding of its function has evolved gradually through history, but the rational and the not-so-rational views of the heart all have their place in a rounded understanding of an organ both vital and revered. In compiling this book the editors invited poets around the English-speaking world, both prominent and up-and-coming, to donate poems about the heart, written from any perspective, whether clinical or fanciful, medical or metaphorical. Among the eighty poets in the book are C. K. Stead, Gwyneth Lewis, David Harsent, Roo Borson, Elizabeth Smither, Robert Gray, Grace Schulman, Rafael Campo, John Kinsella, Peter Goldsworthy, Jennifer Clement, Marilyn Bowering, Philip Gross, Debora Greger and Mimi Khalvati.
They are joined by leading medical professionals whose practice and research has led them to a keen interest in the health of the heart, and they contribute information and advice to help every one of us maintain a healthy heart. The result is that rare thing, a book that satisfies the Horatian dictum that writing should both delight and instruct.
Cover image of an echocardiogram courtesy of Dr. Joseph Gascho.
Love Your Heart
Love your heart: An anthology of poems by children for children about heart health.
Edited by Wendy French and Rebecca Goss, with notes on heart health by Professor Donald Singer, published in 2014.
