Kelley Swain, poet and one-time BSLS Secretary, has recently hosted a celebration of the possibilities of poetry and pathology at the Gordon Museum of Pathology at King’s College London. A selection of poems from Kelley’s new work Opera di Cera, a verse drama inspired by the pathological models at the Museo La Specola in Florence, have recently won the Templar Poetry Pamphlet award for 2013. The actors Rachael Black and Keith Hill performed poems from Opera di Cera while the wax-modeller Eleanor Crook demonstrated some of the techniques involved in making the waxwork models that were so crucial to teaching and studying anatomy and pathology.
To read more about this remarkable event, and about Kelley’s ongoing project with these and other works at the interface of poetry and science, take a look at her blog at ‘What is Dragon’s Blood? And where do I get some?’ | P.S: Poetry & Science.
