Professor Des O’Neill One of the pleasures of medicine is the frequent sense of a shared vision of how enmeshed it is with the humanities. As a group, doctors tend to have a high level of cultural engagement: for example, our own studies show that over 50% of medical students play, or have played an […]
Category: Arts in Medicine
Reflections on Art, Voicelessness, and the Patient Experience
Emma Barnard MA (RCA) ‘Silence is not Golden’ ‘For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate, affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied’. Susan Sontag One […]
Physicians and Magicians: A Magical Education in Life, Death, Power, Potions and Defence Against the Dark Arts by Fiona Dogan and Mark Harper
Abstract The worlds of magic and medicine both involve the sudden initiation of an intimate relationship between two complete strangers – the magician and their subject, or the doctor and their patient. Magic requires the subject to have some degree of trust in the magician, to accept that props and setting may be required to […]
Artist Mark Gilbert and his Portraits of Care: Medical Humanities’ Editors Choice
Anyone lucky enough to have come across or been engaged with Mark Gilbert’s work in the Changing Faces exhibition will be pleased to hear that more of his work is now publicly available. http://mh.bmj.com/content/suppl/2010/06/23/36.1.5.DC1/MH_Appendix_003780.pdf One of Mark’s paintings, Jarad, featured on the cover of the June issue of Medical Humanities and I would urge you to go […]
Believing Without Seeing
Esref Armagan was born blind in Ankara, Turkey. He has now become a famous artist due to his sheer talent and also due to certain significant and unusual reasons. His art displays the colour, vividness, light, dark, imagination and perspective that we are used to considering as the gifts of sight. Esref is changing the […]