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War stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2025

James Seymour Huntley Open the ORCID record for James Seymour Huntley [Opens in a new window]
James Seymour Huntley*
Affiliation:
Department of Pediatric Orthopedics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, US
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Type
Poetry
Information
Palliative & Supportive Care , Volume 23 , 2025 , e93
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Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Hospital visiting-hours:
“Hello John, heard you were
having a spot of bother.”
Old men, knowing how to talk,
in the dusk return:
in youth they moved the bodies
of friends into the sun.
Their tender violent brotherhood
was all, gave all -
packed like jewels -
I envy them their friends,
their stories, their loves,
their war.

Acknowledgments

JSH confirms there is no conflict of interest, and that he is sole author and guarantor. No funding body was involved.

Footnotes

Impact statement: fifty-five word stories are a potentially powerful reflective tool in medicine. Here such a story is told as a prose-poem honouring certain elderly patients, who lived through a time and experiences far more violent than my own.