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Anatomy
Acts Object Guide No.172
Six poems, 2006
Kathleen Jamie
(b1962)
Reproduced
courtesy of the author
Kathleen Jamie is part of a
resurgent Scottish poetry scene, and has received a number of prestigious
awards for her poetry and travel writing collections (such as The Tree
House, 2004 and Findings, 2005). Although chiefly inspired by nature,
her interest in matters medical was stimulated by an invitation to study
the Pathology Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in
2003. Rather than write ‘about’ subjects, she sees her poetry as a writing
'toward' something. In this case she has responded to images and texts
in a number of predominantly 19th-century books such as John Lizars’ Observations
on extraction of diseased ovaria (1825), Antonio Scarpa’s Engravings of
the cardiac nerves… (Tabulae Neurologica) (1832), Richard Quain’s, The
Anatomy of the arteries of the human body (1841), and Leopold & Leisewitz’s
Geburtshilflicher Röntgen-Atlas, (1908). The poems are placed next to
the books all within the ‘Growing & Forming’ section of the exhibition.
The cumulative effect is to remind us of the essential humanity of the
subjects depicted. It was Jamie who suggested the quotation at the start
of the exhibition: ‘Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead
more than the living which are yet alive.’ (Ecclesiastes 4.2)