The Arts and Health Care

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the use of the arts to enhance the patient's recovery process is supported around the world by an increasing number of health care professionals and artists. The author points out that a number of medical schools now requiring the arts in their curriculum is steadily increasing. The paper relates that the arts can enrich and replenish physicians emotionally as well as convey medical and personal ethics effectively, ultimately contributing to their ability to build healthy and human patient-physician relationships. The author reviews the three major categories of creative art---visual, performing and linguistic---to demonstrate the ways each equips both sides of the doctor-patient link with the ability to better understand each other and maximizes their shared situation without over-exercising this relationship.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
The Role of Visual Arts The Role of Language Arts
The Role of Performing Arts
Conclusion: The Present and Future of Artistic Expression in Medicine

From the Paper:

"A third function in this relationship is also very important as depicted in "The Quack," where patients can begin to understand the extreme tension, and obvious need for some kind of personal detachment, felt by the doctor or care-taker who assumes such an authoritative role. It is too easy to see these professionals as also appendages of a technological perfectionism that totally masks the inherent humanness and strain no matter how hard some doctors and care-takers may try to shield themselves from displaying it. Patients can begin to understand someone's blank expression as possibly a defense mechanism, instead of interpreting it as indifference."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Brown, Chistopher. Images of a Golden Past: Dutch Genre Painting of the 17th C (New York: Abbeville Press) 1984
• Ferguson, Laura. Toward a New Aesthetic of the Body Commentary, Artist working in New York City (http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/blog/?p=63).
• Sirridge, Marjorie S. "Works Annotated by Marjorie S. Sirridge"(http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/User?action=viewAnnotator&id=27)
• Williams, William Carlos The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. Publisher New Directions. 1967. New York.
• Edson, Margaret "Wit" Publisher Faber & Faber: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Edition 1999 Place Published New York

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