Talk:Crabbit Old Woman

Where's the poem?[edit]

Does the poem belong here? It's glurge but it's fairly famous glurge in health care circles. 71.33.194.118 (talk) 15:15, 16 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's incredibly well known. I have found an earlier publication than Searle: 'Contact', the magazine of Middleton Hospital in Sheffield, England, 1972. See [1]. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.69.145.98 (talk) 04:41, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Here's another comment on the origin of "Look Closer" that seems authoritative: [2] 24.69.145.98 (talk) 05:14, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The authoritative link sounded good - then again, the various Joanna Bornat articles about the poem (1998 to 2008) also contained a mention of PM's son's letter. However, in 2012, a books.google.com search on "crabbit old woman" puts the authorship beyond doubt, as the claim by Phyllis McCormack, not just her son, goes back to 1973, the same year it was published in the Searle anthology:

Nursing mirror and midwives journal: Volume 136, Issues 1-13, 1973 - MIDWIVES JOURNAL

In our issue of December 22 we published a poem under the title "A crabbit old woman wrote this". ...

... signature and always presumed to have been written by an old lady who died in a geriatric ward, the "original" having been found among her belongings after her death.

... However, following its publication in NURSING MIRROR, we have received a letter from Miss Phyllis McCormack, RFN, a nurse of Sunnyside Hospital, Montrose, Scotland, who explains that she wrote the poem in 1966 for her hospital newsletter and it has since been reprinted several times, before its appearance in NM.

Health and social service journal: Volume 83, 1973

A special duties officer of Calderstones Hospital explained this to the author who turned out to be not a ' crabbit old woman ' as the verse declared but Mrs. Phyllis M. McCormack, a health service worker of Montrose, who has been overwhelmed by the response to her work.

also "Phyllis M McCormack" shows it was published under her name in 1980:

Psychosocial nursing care of the aged Irene Mortenson Burnside - 1980 - 346 pages - Snippet view Phyllis M. McCormack Mrs. Allen, a widowed, retired nurse in her late seventies, was a patient in a nursing home at the time of her death. After years of independence and of "doing for others," she had become increasingly less able to care for ...

Cancerward (talk) 00:26, 24 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]