First audio/online edition: Ghosts of former patients
© 2026 Neil Douglas | published by Wildfire Spoken
First prize winner of Wildfire Words Audio Book Competition 2025
All money donated for access to this book will go to St Joseph’s Hospice, Hackney, London E8 4SA
This book was launched online with readings by Neil and friends on 13 June 2026
If you would like full access to the audio and text of this book, please click here.
Neil Douglas worked as a GP and Community Paediatrician in London’s East End. He graduated with an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College in 2024. Neil’s writing has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK, North America and Hong Kong and has previously been shortlisted in competitions by Wildfire Words.
Ghosts of Former Patients is his first poetry collection to be published.
Click here to see the Contents list
Reviews of Neil’s book
Neil Douglas worked as a GP and Community Paediatrician in the East End of London for many years. In this engaging collection, Ghosts of Former Patients, we meet some of the characters and situations he encountered in his professional life, now re-imagined in skilful and compassionate poetry.
The book is in five sections. In the title poem, Douglas lists various patients passing him on the escalator ‘on the way down from Soft Furnishings / to Barbeque Equipment in the basement –‘. It’s a powerful metaphor for the descent from heaven to hell and the transience of life.
The variety of poetic forms matches each subject matter. There are tercets, couplets, carefully crafted shaped text and prose poems. As Douglas comments: ‘there are similarities between writing poetry and General Practice ‘with an emphasis on human contact / connection….life at the extremes of experience that will challenge personal emotions and empathy.’ Both media have appeal because of their unpredictability.
While many of the patient stories are heart-rending or even tragic, Douglas’s humour and warmth are evident. Ghosts of Former Patients should be read by all medical students and health professionals and then re-read and listened to again to savour its wisdom, humanity and thought-provoking words.
Dr Emma Storr
A full-length version of Dr Storr’s review is available via this link.
Ghosts of former patients is a stunningly tender book of well-crafted poetry, offering a glimpse into the unique position held by caring professionals in the lives of strangers. Our encounters with the ghosts of this book are gut-wrenchingly intimate, but we – the speaker and reader both – remain absolutely at the periphery, attending and observing at a distance. Like the silence that ‘creeps to fill the corners of the room’ (‘Enquiry made under Section 47 of the Children Act’), that which goes unspoken speaks loudest here.
Douglas’ close attention to the soundscape of these poems (nowhere more striking than in ‘Kelson House’) and occasional humour (‘Mother/daughter consultations’) make this book a real joy to read and to listen to.
Dr Katherine Parsons
Ghosts of former patients is a life-affirming poetry collection that provides engaging – and visceral — insights into a doctor’s life. Having had three life-threatening experiences, I know how it feels to be an anxious patient. And I often wondered how doctors feel about their life-saving responsibilities. Neil Douglas’s audio book provides wonderful, very human, insights.
The “God-complex” gripe of some critics is much at odds with my own experiences of supportive medical staff. Neil Douglas’s book has a final section to express his spiritual experience — Empathy for the Devil. It starts with a prose poem comparing himself with a trapeze-artist, having to catch someone “flying” from another trapeze.
What I particularly pondered, when in hospital as fellow patients died, is how doctors cope with such memories. Neil’s title poem and those that follow graphically reveal the answer. Those patients live on in the doctor’s mind.
Howard Timms
Dedication
This audio book is dedicated to the memory of my mother Christine who taught me how to speak and with grateful thanks to my family ‒ Jean, Jamie, Heather, Kyron and my sister Catherine for their support of my endeavours.
Author’s foreword
Writing poetry is much like General Practice – small discrete bundles of care with an emphasis on human contact/ connection, endless variety, vulnerability, life at the extremes of experience that will challenge personal emotions and empathy. As a practitioner of both you never know exactly what will arrive next and that is part of the appeal.
All the poems here are written from my working experience as an NHS GP and Community Paediatrician. Patient details have been altered in order to protect individuals and many of the scenarios are a composite of events and situations encountered through my clinical practice. However, the emotional heft and insight with which they are written is genuine and I hope this is felt by readers.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the following groups who have helped workshop many of these poems:
Mary Mulholland and Red Door Poets, Goldsmiths MA workshop, alice hiller and Voicing Our Silences/Covent Garden Stanza, Wednesday evening workshop group.
My Goldsmiths poetry tutors – Richard Scott, Blake Morrison and Karen McCarthy Woolf
My City Lit tutors – Barbara Marsh and Christina Dunhill
Natalie Whittaker for her critical reading of a draft of this collection. Tamsin Hopkins for guidance on how to construct a pamphlet.
My daughter Heather Douglas for the cover design
Photograph by Annie Walsh
The editors of the following publications where some of these poems first appeared:
Ambit, Dreich, Mingled Voices ( Proverse Publishing, Hong Kong), These are the Hands, Poems from the Heart of the NHS (Fair Acre Press), Public Sector Poetry Journal , Hippocrates Prize Anthology, Wildfire Words.
With special thanks to Howard and Marilyn Timms at Wildfire Words for selecting my collection and to filter judge Katharine Parsons. I am indebted to Howard and Bradley Cross for their diligence and expertise in recording my words.
Contents
2 Yesterday I met a boy with holes
Neuro-developmental clinic
Memo 13
Paediatrics
Girl, Looked-after, aged eight
He told me
His brother Isaac laughs
Enquiry made under Section 47 of the Children Act
Forever Family
3 When I came to visit you at home
When I came to visit you at home
Rosie
Kafka’s uncle
Kelson House
Lansbury Morgue
4 Are you listening doc?
Dysfunction
Once there was a urologist
Mother/Daughter consultations
She arrives for her check-up
The bus
Morning clinic
The dead faery sign
Empathy for the Devil
1 Ghosts of former patients
Ghosts of former patients
I meet them on the escalator
on the way down from Soft Furnishings
to Barbeque Equipment in the basement ‒
the diabetic with athlete’s foot who insists
he never eats more than broccoli and fresh air
but has gained another kilo;
the hypertensive gambler who wanted to be
a Jesuit priest until he met a Jewish woman
and is now a kinder type of man;
the elegant French teacher with terminal cancer
who recommends all medical students read
The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde.
I can’t recognise her wide smile now
but the Somali widow is Nike of Samothrace.
Consumed by HIV she catches me
in the defiant downdraft of her wings,
while Lily’s oxygen mask hisses
on the armchair rest as she lights up
one last cigarette and BANG!
Her eyelids tight shut but I still see
her plume of smoke.
2 Yesterday I met a boy with holes
Girl, Looked-after, aged eight
After the consultation I ask her
if she has questions for me.
Kids like her usually ask how old I am,
what I had for breakfast,
how many teeth I have,
and do I brush my teeth?
But she asks me do you want to know
how the dinosaurs died?
And I say yes, I’d like to know,
so she tells me about a meteor
that crashed to earth, a huge explosion,
clouds of dust blotted out the sun
and the dinosaurs died
because they couldn’t live without the light,
the plants, the warmth,
their family.
3 When I came to visit you at home
When I came to visit you at home
Your dog’s eyes always followed me around the room
showing me to my seat on your brown Parker Knoll,
shining, intensely black but somehow still
and I found that stillness reassuring
as we sat and talked about bunions and loneliness
and the irrelevant necessity of Viagra
because I was used to arriving at other visits anxious,
greeted by the muscled thud of a growling torso
launched against the door frame inside.
He’s only being playful, the other owners used to say
between the snarls, the barks, the saliva dripped
like wet elastic in time to the beat of my fear.
But then there was your dog (good dog) —
so affectionate, so obedient, so still — a tribute
to your loving care and the almost obsolete art
of a Bow Road taxidermist.
4 Are you listening doc?
Mother/Daughter consultations
A double golden shovel after Cecilia Vicuña
You are spoiling for a fight, you and your
mum, sitting together/apart, your rage
bubbling, barely contained when I ask is
everything good between you two? Is your
living together/apart winning gold
in the family Olympics? Are your
latest scores for fili/matricidal rage
below six point nine, or above? And is
your barely concealed loathing for me, your
doctor, really a sign of your mutual love?
A year later, one empty chair, and your
grief is raw and I sense your rage
simmer, rising above my gaze when I ask is
your life without her tolerable? Is your
anger/sadness tempered by the gold-
en glow of heartfelt memories? Are your
latest scores on the inventory for rage
approaching nine point six, or below? And is
your persistent antipathy for her, your
daughter, actually what it is to suffer love?
5 Empathy for the Devil
Empathy for the Devil
With a gentle, loving, hand
apply the sticking plaster
to my flesh wound, doctor.
Show me how much you care.
Care for me with an open heart.
It’s all I ask for doctor.
I am broken. I am broken
and I need you to mend me.
Make me good, then tell me why,
with kind words softly-spoken,
I feel this insistent crying shame.
Could you do that, doctor?
I demand, command you, heal my soul.
And I, in return, will consume you whole.
Neil Douglas
Neil worked as a GP and Community Paediatrician in London’s East End. He graduated with an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College in 2024. Neil’s writing has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK, North America and Hong Kong and has previously been shortlisted in competitions by Wildfire Words.
Ghosts of Former Patients is his first poetry collection to be published.
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