On the one hand, if the doctor is physically unable to treat, then he is not responsible for withholding treatment. On the other hand, by being rendered professionally helpless, perhaps he is being punished for not taking a moral stance against his patient. This interpretation seems to have validity because the last line recalls Psalm 137, which warns, “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” 

For drawing attention to the biblical reference, I am grateful to Dr. Danielle Ofri (clinical professor) and Lara DeLong (Class of 2001), both at NYU School of Medicine. Dannie Abse (1923-2014) was a practicing physician and poet. 

Reading by Dannie Abse

Case History
‘Most Welshmen are worthless,
an inferior breed, doctor.’
He did not know I was Welsh.
Then he praised the architects
of the German death-camps–
did not know I was a Jew.
He called liberals, ‘White blacks’,
and continued to invent curses.

When I palpated his liver
I felt the soft liver of Goering;
when I lifted my stethoscope
I heard the heartbeats of Himmler;
when I read his encephalograph
I thought, ‘Sieg heil, mein Fuhrer.’

In the clinic’s dispensary
red berry of black bryony,
cowbane, deadly nightshade, deathcap.
Yet I prescribed for him
as if he were my brother.

Later that night I must have slept
on my arm: momentarily
my right hand lost its cunning.

Commentary

“Sometimes it’s very difficult to like some patients. Patients imagine that they’re always likable, but in fact there are some one has great difficulty with, I think. And indeed there was one patient that bugged me so sufficiently that I wrote two poems about him.”

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.
Web image created by Medhum.org

The narrator in this three-stanza poem observes men in a mental hospital who suffer from what at the time (World War I) was called shell shock and now might be labeled post-traumatic stress disorder. In any case, they are insane; they relive the “batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles.”

For these tortured souls, “sunlight seems a bloodsmear” and “dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.” They cannot escape their hideous memories of the warfare. The narrator sees them as living in hell, and he accepts for all society the blame for what has happened to them–we, he says, have “dealt them war and madness.”

Wilfred Owen is recognized as the master poet of the First World War. Writing from firsthand experiences, both in combat and in a hospital recovering from battle fatigue, Owen gave us image after image of how horrible this war was — how the idealized notions of heroism and manly valor meant next to nothing when one was trying to survive gas attacks and bombs dropped from planes. Owen was killed a week before the armistice.

In this poem he opens with a series of questions about who these mental cases are, why they rock back and forth in some kind of purgatory, why they are so tortured with panic and misery. In the second stanza, he answers the opening questions: these are the men whose minds have been ruined by their war experiences, for whom the grotesque carnage of the war was “rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.”

In the final stanza, he explains why these men are so tortured by their memories. And, typical of Owen, he points out that everyone who supported the war contributed to the madness of these mental cases.

📖 Read the poem

The Poems of Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Edition: 1986
Editors: Jon Stallworthy
Place Published: New York

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image created by Medhum.org