I am a student at UCLA who is potentially pre-med. And as somebody who does not consider themselves as STEM minded as they are artistically minded, I try to look at everything with an artistic lens. That being said, I looked into what I consider to be the best mix of medicine and art I’ve ever seen: Body Worlds. This exhibit started my interest in medicine, being an entire exploration of the human body. People donated their bodies to this project, and we see amazing things like an entire human nervous system, completely real, painstakingly removed from a donated human cadaver. While it would take an immense amount of understanding of the human body in order to separate out these body parts, knowing exactly what you’re cutting for, there is the artistic element of the displays in how to pose the bodies in the most provocative way. Medicine and art worked together hand and hand to create an absolutely unreal display that has traveled the world a dozen times over.
In addition to medicine and art being used together, art is an actual medium of practicing medicine, particularly psychiatry, called art therapy. Art therapists will look at things as minute as colors, positions, if the subjects have hands, if feet are drawn touching the floor, facial expressions, posture, subject matter, et cetera and from this assess psychological states, family and social dynamics, childhood trauma, suppressed emotions, and the likes. This and Patricia Olynick’s contributions to the discussion of medicine and art, making a commentary on the relationship between the two regarding expression medicine and technology in artistic ways.
Philosophy, which I would consider an art, also comments on the combination of art and medicine with the Hippocratic Oath, the one new doctors must make to promise to do no harm.
This week essentially reminded me of the first time I saw the bridged gap between medicine (and med-tech) and art, and exposed me to more examples of it and the people who are leading the seeing through of the efforts to do so.
Sources:
“Patricia Olynyk.” Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts - Washington University in St. Louis, samfoxschool.wustl.edu/people/faculty/60-patricia-olynyk. Accessed 06 June 2024.
American Art Therapy Association, 6 June 2024, arttherapy.org/. Accessed 06 June 2024.
“Oath of Modern Hippocrates.” Penn State College of Medicine Current Students, 11 May 2021, students.med.psu.edu/md-students/oath/#:~:text=I%20shall%20do%20by%20my,important%20goal%20in%20everyone’s%20life. Accessed 06 June 2024.
Antoinette Essa, WTVR CBS 6 Web Staff. “‘body World’ Exhibit at Science Museum of Virginia Explores Mind-Body Connection to Happiness.” CBS 6 News Richmond WTVR, 31 May 2024, www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/anatomy-of-happiness-science-museum-of-virginia-may-31-2024. Accessed 06 June 2024.
Corwin, William. “Truth in the Visual Arts Skepticism in the Work of Ellen K. Levy and Patricia Olynyk.” The Brooklyn Rail, 5 Apr. 2016, brooklynrail.org/2016/04/artseen/truth-in-the-visual-arts. Accessed 06 June 2024.
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