oneirophrenia | My new favorite site.

Art and Medicine.

Yes, there are plenty of cool vintage medical photos there to tickle your grotesque fancy....

But the highlight of the sight is John Wood's collection of medical poems that he wrote about various deforming skin and subdermal conditions of the day, each accompanied by a lovely photo of a patient displaying said symptoms. My favorite is "Elephantiasis":

Do not say to me that she is not beautiful,
that her body does not sing out in choirs
of honeyed promise--unfulfilled--and that,
though so exposed, she is not more modest than you,
that no matter what your life's hard crest,
hers has been more breakered and stinging.
Could she have had any dream that did not plunge
and foam to nothing? Think on her this day.
She could not have known what would have been asked of her,
having once again, as she had since scarlatina,
done as a doctor said do, but this day having agreed
to allow a stranger to witness, to photograph
the secret widths and folds, the tumbling flesh
of her legs and feet, knowing even the kindest eye
would think the huge word, see the lumbering animal,
not a young girl who dreamed no more of dancing.
But he would demand even more. Notice
how hastily she's tossed her dress over her head,
to make a veil, to veil him out and blind the event.
Notice her arms' quick covering of those Biblical breasts
whose sway any Herod or Solomon, merely to watch,
might trade mountains of myrrh, calamus, and cinnamon,
gold or the very neck of prophecy. Notice the timid finger,
how, childlike, she's put it to her lips, standing there
as she never before had been. Who then could not have said,
"Ask of me whatever you will." For such modesty and grace
who would not have granted her temples of wishes,
all smelling of cedar, of myrrh and covenants?
And then you begin to see, from her belly's ripe curve
and the abundant, waiting mystery, that with the power
of such thighs and the will of such legs
she could dance with the thunder of the Mother,
could bring forth all risings and ripenings,
the splitting seed, pomegranates spilling into fortunes,
and all earthly mothers their progress and delivery;
that she as well could dance the moons' cold turns,
their chills and fevers, the sloughings off
and diminishments, excavations and the final failings.
But do not turn away from her.
Lift off her veil. See the three of them
--mother, lover, daughter--move, slowly as seasons,
slowly as a lifetime, into your arms.

The verse is actually surprisingly good, almost free verse with a touch of English Heroic Meter as described by Milton in the preface to Paradise Lost. Check them out, as they may be some of the best poetry I've read in ages.