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Saturday 27 April 2013

Young poet to receive new Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

The winner of the inaugural Hippocrates Young Poets Prize of £500 is Rosalind Jana from
Winner Rosalind Jana
Hereford Sixth Form College in England, for her poem ‘Posterior Instrumented Fusion for Adolescent Scoliosis’.


The international Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is for an unpublished poem in English on a medical theme. Entrants were young poets from anywhere in the world aged 14 to 18 years. The 2013 Prize attracted entries from the UK, USA and Australia.

The winning entry was decided by judge and award-winning poet Clare Pollard, who published her first collection of poetry at the age of 19. 

Rosalind Jana is a sixth form student and part-time freelance journalist. She won the Vogue Talent Contest for young writers in 2011 at age sixteen and has subsequently written for Vogue several times. She regularly contributes to Lionheart Magazine, Oxfam and fashion initiative All Walks Beyond the Catwalk. She has a conditional offer to read English Literature at Oxford. 

About the Hippocrates Young Poets Prize she said: “I'm very pleased to be judging the first Hippocrates Prize for Schools - in bringing science and art together, I hope it will deepen students’ understanding of both, and uncover poets of the future.” She added that the top entries were “extraordinarily accomplished for writers of 18 or under”. 

Of Rosalind Jana’s winning poem she commented: “It is hard to believe that a poem with
Judge Clare Pollard
such an ugly name can be so beautiful, but it is an incredible display of control and craft, formally brilliant and full of striking visual imagery - the shuttered murk, the meaty spine, the cloak of skin, the ‘morphine black blown out by light’.  It is both passionate and eerily detached - a deeply impressive piece of work.”

Hippocrates Prize founders clinical professor Donald Singer and poet Michael Hulse said: “We are delighted that the Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is already having an international impact in inspiring a new generation of poets.”

The Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is supported by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine, the National Association of Writers in Education, and the Cardiovascular Research Trust.

The Hippocrates Initiative – winner of the 2011 Times Higher Education Award for
Innovation and Excellence in the Arts – is an interdisciplinary venture that investigates the synergy between medicine, the arts, and health.

To attend the Young Poets, NHS and Open Hippocrates Prize award ceremony in London on 18th May at the Wellcome Collection and the related Symposium on Poetry and Medicine see http://hippocrates-poetry.org

Notes for editors
For more information about Hippocrates Prize winners and extracts of their winning poems, contact hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com

About the winner
Rosalind Jana is a sixth form student and part-time freelance journalist. She won the Vogue Talent Contest for young writers in 2011 at age sixteen and has subsequently written for Vogue several times. She regularly contributes to Lionheart Magazine, Oxfam and fashion initiative All Walks Beyond the Catwalk. She has a conditional offer to read English Literature at Oxford. Further information can be found at clothescamerasandcoffee.blogspot.com

About her winning poem Rosalind said:
'At the age of fifteen I underwent an operation to fix my extraordinarily twisted spine. I had been diagnosed with scoliosis six months previously when my degree of curvature stood at 56 degrees. By the time I was offered surgery this had progressed to nearly 80 degrees. My backbone had compressed into the shape of a lopsided 'S', my right shoulder blade sticking out like a small wing and rib-cage barrelled to the left. I wheezed when I walked. Sharp aches and jabs of pain were expected. The surgical solution was to cut into my back, place titanium rods on either side of the vertebrae and screw them in place. This would manually straighten my spine and it would fuse solid over the next few months."

"Recovery was physically, emotionally and psychologically challenging. All that remains now is my scar. I am fascinated with its visual resonance, the way in which those complicated months full of agony and debilitation could have been reduced to a single, fading line of flesh. The poem was an attempt to express the strange disconnect between the skin I can see, and the muscle and bone lying beneath that my surgeon and his assistants worked with for five hours. I wanted to show how extraordinary a process it is and how intricate, messy and beautiful the body can be."


About judge Clare Pollard
Clare Pollard has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Changeling (Bloodaxe, 2011), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She published her first collection, The Heavy-Petting Zoo, with Bloodaxe in 1998 aged 19. Her play The Weather premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and her documentary for radio, ‘My Male Muse’, was a Radio 4 Pick of the year.  She co-edited the anthology Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century and her new collection, Ovid’s Heroines, will be published by Bloodaxe this year.

More about the Hippocrates Initiative
The Hippocrates initiative was established in 2009 and already offers two successful annual poetry prizes, one open to submissions from anyone anywhere in the world, the other restricted to NHS employees (present and past) and UK health students. In each category a first prize of £5,000 is awarded. The Hippocrates Prize has attracted thousands of entries from 55 countries, from the Americas to Fiji, from Finland to Australasia, and prizewinners have come from New Zealand and the US as well as the UK.


Sunday 21 April 2013

Update from Paris on Geneva EACPT Congress 28-31 Aug 2013

The EACPT Executive Committee met in Paris 18th-20th April with as major business planning for the 11th biennial EACPT congress to be held from 28th – 31st August 2013 in Geneva.  
EACPT biennial congresses provide excellent opportunities to showcase issues of topical international concern to the CPT community.
EACPT Executive Committee at the Hôpital St Antoine in Paris
For the Geneva Congress, it has been confirmed by the local Swiss organisers
Marie Besson and Caroline Samer that there will be 101 invited speakers from 21 countries - 15 from the European region and a further 6 countries internationally, from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, China, Benin and India. Close to 400 abstracts have been submitted from 57 countries from all 5 continents for consideration for oral and poster communications. 
 
Key themes at the Geneva congress will range from bedside pharmacology for special patient groups to pharmacology & toxicology, and pharmacology and society.

To register for the Geneva EACPT Congress, go to the Congress website.

Sunday 14 April 2013

2013 Hippocrates Poetry & Medicine Awards Symposium

A great opportunity to spend a day with an international speaker panel discussing the interface between poetry and medicine, at the Wellcome Rooms in London on Saturday 18th May.

Of interest to poets, patients, health professionals, academics and members of the public.

At the end of the symposium, Open and NHS awards for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry & Medicine will be announced by the judges at this 4th International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine.

Register for the whole day or for the afternoon Hippocrates Awards Symposium

Symposium Programme

With a £5000 first prize in each category, this is one of the highest value awards in the world for a single unpublished poem.

More on the awards

The judging panel for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize comprises: Jo Shapcott, winner of the 2011 Queen's
Gold Medal for Poetry, Theodore Dalrymple, doctor and writer, and Roger Highfield, science writer and Executive for the Science Museums Group.

The 2013 judges met in London on 25th March at the offices of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine to agree short-lists for the NHS and Open categories for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

NHS awards

Five poets have been short-listed for the 2013 NHS awards. For all 5 poets, it is their first time to feature within the Hippocrates Awards.

The judges have agreed a further 18 commendations. 12 are new to the Hippocrates Prize. Three have previously won top 3 awards in the Hippocrates Prize and a further 2 have previously been commended by Hippocrates Prize judges. One of this year's featured poets has been commended for 2 of her entries.

Open awards

Four poets have been short-listed for the 2013 awards, 1 from New Zealand, 1 from the UK, and 2 from the USA - one from California and 1 from Massachusetts. For all 4 poets, this is their first time to feature within the Hippocrates Awards.

The judges have agreed a further 19 commendations in the Open category.

Judging for the Hippocrates Prize is anonymous and entries are also presented to the judges in an order that avoids clustering of names of poets.

The 2013 Hippocrates Anthology of the 47 winning and commended poems will be launched after the Awards Symposium at the Wellcome Rooms in London on Saturday 18th May.

Saturday 13 April 2013

BMS Young Investigators' Symposium: Advances in the Microcirculation

An excellent scientific event held at the University of Warwick, with international participants from Russia, Italy, Poland and Germany.
An outstanding series of young scientists presented undergraduate projects, PhD research and post-doctoral studies, topics ranging from fundamental endothelial signalling to cancer, retinal, cardiovascular and stroke mechanisms, biomarkers and treatments.
The organisers are to be congratulated on a well-run, well-chaired and lively event, fully justifying its generous support by major UK cognate societies and organisations, including the British Pharmacological Society, the Physiology Society, the Company of Biologists, The Richard Bright VEGF Research Trust, and the British Heart Foundation, complementing core support by the British Microcirculation Society, and making the event affordable for young life scientists interested in the microcirculation, including support in the form of travel bursaries for abstract presenters.
Future BMS Young Investigators' Symposia deserve to be a priority in the meetings' diary for young UK and international scientists interested in the microcirculation and in a friendly forum for first presentations, asking a first question of colleagues and more senior presenters, and making research contacts for their future careers: next provisionally set for 2 years time.
Look out for BMS events at the International Union of Physiological Societies Congress in Birmingham 21-26 July 2013 and the joint BMS-BPS symposium on new pharmacological targets in the microcirculation at Pharmacology 2013 in December in London.
See more at BMS Young Investigators blog.