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  • The Curator
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The Curator

Norman Kreitman

Step this way, sir. Just here you may see
a child’s head so full of water
that the world’s alarms were quite drowned out.
And here a heart that would never have survived
the traffic of love. Over there a liver
which maps the empire of the wily spirochaete.
There is much to observe so let us proceed
through the upper galleries; our house
has many mansions. You feel queasy, sir?
Some gentlemen who call declare their satisfaction
that here – if nowhere else – the unredeemed,
the prevatio boni, is safely imprisoned
in glass and alcohol. But these are my wards,
my charges; they give little trouble. Patiently
they serve our diligent study, which seeks to grasp
how Nature’s lapses are Nature still.
I cherish them, sir, against the day
when the halt and the maimed shall be made fleet.
But if you find these shelves of evil tedious to bear,
why, there’s the exit. Thank you again for your interest.

Prevatio boni — a theological term, considered as an absence of the good


Norman Kreitman

To celebrate the Quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, twenty-one Scottish poets were commissioned by the Scottish Poetry Library to write poems inspired by the College’s collections and work. Like surgeons they have used ‘the hand that sees’, but in this case the writing hand that acts at the prompting of insight and imagination. The poems and their comments, alongside photographs of items that inspired them, were published in The Hand that Sees: Poems for the quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, edited by Stewart Conn, and published by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in association with the Scottish Poetry Library in 2005.

from The Hand that Sees: Poems for the quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, edited by Stewart Conn (Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in association with the Scottish Poetry Library, 2005)

Reproduced by permission of the author.

Tags:

disease dramatic monologue galleries and museums medicine Poetry By Heart Scotland post-1914 the body The Hand that Sees

About this poem

 

Author’s note:

The persona of this poem is entirely fictional, and is in no sense modelled on Mr. Andrew Connell, the Collection Manager, who most kindly introduced me to the museum and pointed out some of its features.

 

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Norman Kreitman1927 - 2012

Norman Kreitman was born in London and trained as a doctor, later specialising in psychiatry. In 1966 he moved to Edinburgh to take up a research post and lived there until his death. He published four collections of poetry.
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