Art and medicine
An interesting perspective on the relationship between art and medicine from rachel Pope in Be’er-sheva, Israel.
‘These last few weeks I have not been able to submit any blog entries because I have had too many things going on outside of class. All of the activities were well worth the time, though, and all of them, were unintentionally related to art in medicine.
“Art doesn’t give answers; art asks questions,” was the theme of my English class the first year of high school when our teacher decided to incorporate modern art into our literature and writing analysis training. In this vein, we learned that art can be an uninhibited expression of life experiences that can be used to show us the world through an individual’s unique perspective, and sometimes more deliberately, used to challenge the way we see the world. It’s easy to understand therefore, how physicians and physicians in training who work in fulfilling but also challenging and at times frustrating circumstances might have several experiences that may evoke a need to express their questions through various media.
In the last few months, I was fortunate to a have few chances to share some of my own questions as well as learn from others in my medical community. In March, a few of us at MSIH put on a theater production of “A Memory, a Rant, a Monologue, and a Prayer,” the 10th anniversary edition of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, which focused on the seriousness of violence that persists in our world today and the need to prevent and stop it. In this piece of art, 12 medical students and community members were able to pass on the stories of women and men from around the world who needed to express the violence they had either survived or witnessed in order to process it themselves as well as raise awareness against it. This piece asked us, “Why do we continue to hurt each other?” and “How can we as physicians prevent and recognize violence?”
Shortly thereafter, I was asked to contribute to a student literary journal, where several students, physicians, and professors shared poems and writing from experiences both in the US and from around the world. Each piece was an invitation to the memories or imaginations of these individuals that allowed us to feel some of their questions through their own words. As part of that journal’s release party, we were asked to read something we had written. Listening to each author speak his or her words in the packed pub, allowed us to actually hear the emotion behind the words and added a new element to understanding their perspectives through tones and stresses, and sometimes accents.
Around the same time, our school’s chapter of AMSA hosted a photography contest, ending with a gallery show of what international health might look like through a camera lens. These photos proved to be more ambiguous. We don’t really know exactly what the photographer was thinking when he or she took the photo or what he or she wants to ask us by sharing them. All we could do was ask ourselves what was evoked by looking at the world through their eyes and memories.
There are plenty of other venues for art in medicine that are continuing to challenge the way we look at medicine and the way we look at ourselves. The Healer’s Art, for example, is filling up classrooms with students eager to process their thoughts and feelings through writing and gain new perspectives from one another’s words. It might be the other side of the brain for some of us, one that gets a bit rusty from time to time, but it is to our benefit to continue training it as well and continue to challenge ourselves with the questions that we might only be able to articulate through art. ’
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