The therapeutic power of poetry in Ian McEwan's Saturday and The Children Act.

The present paper analyses the therapeutic power of poetry in the form of poetic epiphanies and epiphanic knowledge in medicine, in two illness narratives of Ian McEwan. The first novel Saturday deals with a patient suffering from Huntington's disease. The second novel The Children Act deals with a leukemia patient. Both of these novels show how literary and creative art forms like poetry can generate epiphanic moments for the patient and epiphanic knowledge for medical professionals which act as moments of opportunity to cultivate and encourage empathetic clinical practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]