Visual Poetry and Depicting the History of Medicine

Visual poetry is familiar to most of us as a poetic form that arranges its words on the page to create an image of its subject. For example, the heart-shaped love poems so many of us penned for our childhood valentines. Yet this most accessible and recognizable of forms does not always depict such charmingly innocuous themes. In “The Parable of Winifred McGuinness,” the unadorned, squat, block-shaped stanzas resemble the grim tenements of late 1800s Boston, overcrowded buildings that became disease-infested deathtraps for their impoverished inhabitants, mostly Irish immigrants. The densely compacted language of the poem further suggests the cramped living conditions in these “fevered” buildings, which we are reminded lacked basic sanitation measures, most notably indoor plumbing. Foul language, from the more mysteriously supernatural (“miasma”) to the more crassly vernacular (“shite”), even evokes the noxious atmosphere that permeated these tenements, which were thought capable of spreading contagions such as cholera, an idea prevalent before the advent of modern microbiology and infectious disease expertise. If we wonder why such a dire story should be expressed in poetry—indeed, the poem reads almost like a diary entry or even a public health advisory—perhaps it is the courage expressed by the speaker, an undaunted mother who pushes against the confines of her rank living conditions and resists what many might simply have seen as her fate, that inspires such plaintive and clear-eyed, and paradoxically beautiful, art.