As conference poet, my role was to compose poetry in response to papers and presentations at Medicine in its Place: Situating Medicine in Historical Contexts—the Society for the Social History of Medicine Conference, held at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in July 2016, organised by Professor Carsten Timmermann and Professor Julie Anderson with contributions from her PhD students. In addition to this, I facilitated a poetry-and-medicine workshop. During the conference, I also tweeted fragments of poetry under the hashtag #sshm16.

I was motivated to respond to a number of papers, and individual poems from this body of work were later published in the following publications:

1. “the art of hygiene in scripture” (published in Blackbox Manifold) — after Hana Oh’s A Naval Surgeon’s Journey Across the Pacific: Alexander Rattray and the Development of his Medical Thoughts.

2. “Part nostrum part vermifuge” (published in Blackbox Manifold) — arising from Dr. Stephen Kenny’s paper “From the Reception of Diseased Negroes”? Place, Space, and Slave Hospital, on the purchasing of chronically sick slaves and human experimentation under American slavery.

3. “For The Miners” (published in Blackbox Manifold) — written in response to papers by Mike Mantin, David M. Turner, and Alexandra Jones on Locating Disability in the British Industrial Revolution; Disability in the Miner’s Home, 1900–1948; Deformed Landscape, Disabled Industry: Disability in Coalfields Literature.

4. “If you were here” (Tears in the Fence, issue 65) — for Elena Berger’s paper Places of Interest for a Surgeon: Ambroise Paré (1510–1590) and his Voyages.

5. “chiuso morbo” (Westerly Magazine, DisAbility issue) — inspired by historical accounts of people with leprosy. The poetic sequence House-girl extends from this context, examining how the fear of contagion has historically inscribed disease with hysteria, revulsion, and an enduring tradition of stigmatisation.

6. The panel led by Winston Black, Irina Metzler, and Katherine Harvey,The Medieval Confessional as a Medicalized Space provoked a sequence of poems entitled Bettbehandlung. Here, I deliberately confront religious stigmatizations and stereotypes that reinforce the belief that sickness is a consequence of moral failing. Drawing problematic theological framings of blame, sin, and guilt into focus, this work not only consolidated my existing practice at the intersection of poetry and the medical humanities but also marked a turning point in my ars poetica. The research opened a trajectory towards exploring other historical abuses of the marginalised and culminated in the publication of Bettbehandlung, a feminist re-visioning of the treatment of so-called ‘hysterical’ women in medical history.