To Sir William Gull – poem

‘In a work of psychiatry, only the patients’ remarks interest me’

(E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, 1973)

We're often monitored. ‘Watch and wait’.

This is like playing Titanic on repeat

and expecting the berg to move.

They need proof of impact, so they wait,

even though death's slide, like a sheet

of black ice, is often not seen.

It's deranged – measuring the mind

by our vital signs. Some scrawl S O S,

in bone or ash, but only numbers carry.

We were left to drown. And this jagged label,

hung like a necklace of teeth,

snags in my brain.

Take ‘without appetite’, from the Greek,

string with ‘nervous’ (Latin), seal

with the sure shellac of authority

and you ossify a distraction.

Return to origins: hunger strikes

in the threatened spirit.

Tell me the Greek for ‘loss of agency’,

the Latin for ‘a starved soul’.

A term should touch the truth.

Consumption was recast as TB,

not left in the nineteenth century

to gather bone-webs of myth.

If more men had been dissolved by

this force, would doctors care

more about precision?

The name fits like a corset.

Miss A, Miss B and the unnamed case

would have coined it from the inside,

though I know this captor gags.

And even when aired,

the patient's word is rarely heard.

Note: The term anorexia nervosa, a misnomer, was coined by Sir William Gull in 1873. Miss A, Miss B and the unnamed case were his first recorded case studies.

This poem was commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2022.