Body and soul

U establishes new arts and humanities center

Mary Faith Marshall, director of the Center for Medical Humanities and the Arts, hopes one day to teach medical students about depression, addiction and grief through a course on the blues.

By Miriam Karmel

From eNews, Feb. 8, 2007; updated Feb. 20, 2007

It is difficult to get the news from poems
Yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

"...to get the news from poems..."

This fragment of a poem by William Carlos Williams would be a perfect medical school course title, says Mary Faith Marshall, director of the new Center for Medical Humanities and the Arts at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

That is to say, poetry may be less practical than the news, yet our spirits are diminished for want of it. Williams, who was a doctor by day and poet by night, understood the importance of ministering to both body and soul.

Feeding the soul of those who care for the body is the new center's mission. To that end, Marshall and Jon Hallberg, the center's medical director, will forge links between the Medical School and the College of Liberal Arts and draw on the resources of the Twin Cities' vibrant arts community. Their task is to make room for the right brain in the left-brain-dominated world of medicine.

"Medicine is not just about science," says Deborah Powell, dean of the Medical School, which provides funding for the center. "Medicine is about human beings caring for the health and wellness of other human beings." The arts and humanities are key to nurturing what Powell calls "the humanness of medicine."

Nationally, the idea of injecting a dose of humanities into the medical curriculum coincided, some 50 years ago, with a movement toward primary and patient-centered care. Over the next 30 years, more than 90 U.S. medical schools introduced the humanities into their medical curricula, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Many of the early programs had a literary bent. One of the best known, the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, required all second-year medical students to study literary texts as a way of learning to "read" their patients' stories. Proponents contend that a doctor who can read fiction is better prepared to listen and follow the narrative thread of a patient's story. Similarly, it has been argued that learning to view a painting can sharpen a physician's observational skills.

"[The center is] an opportunity for our university to show that medicine is much more than drugs and procedures," says medical student Cuong Pham. "It's also about compassion and empathy."

Minnesota's program will expand on those early ideas, says Hallberg. "Mary Faith and I are trying to break the mold. We don't want our program to be like any other," he says.

Growing room

For starters, they plan to embrace all of the arts--music and film, as well as literature--and history and social science. Hallberg and Marshall envision a large-scale collaboration with area arts organizations, including the Weisman Art Museum, Walker Art Center, Minnesota Opera Company, Guthrie Theater (Hallberg is company physician), and perhaps even local bookstores and Minnesota Public Radio (where Hallberg regularly reports).

At the same time, the center will play muse to the artists. Currently, Hallberg is working with the American Composers Forum in St. Paul to establish a composer in residence at the Medical School, perhaps the first program of its kind in the nation. The plan is to invite a composer to take part in all aspects of the medical school experience, from patient care to end-of-life decision-making--the idea being that immersion in the medical culture will inspire a musical composition.

The new center's medical director, Jon Hallberg, believes the arts can deliver important messages about bioethics in a way that standard lectures can't.

At its simplest level, the Center for Medical Humanities and the Arts will serve as a clearinghouse, using a Web site to inform the medical community about local arts happenings.

The center's long-range plans also include the creation of instructional courses. Marshall, for example, would like to teach a course on the blues--music, that is--which she says evince many ailments physicians would encounter in clinical practice: depression, addiction, abuse, violence, dying and grief. "It's all there in the music," she says. "It's a different way for students to understand."

At the same time, the center might offer a writing class or a course on producing audio documentaries like those aired on National Public Radio, says Hallberg, who favors an elective approach. "As passionate as I am about the humanities, I find it hard to force too much on anyone," he says, adding, "You can't create an empathetic student. But the center can create an atmosphere to nurture and foster humanistic impulses."

Students need that reinforcement, says Cuong Pham, a fourth-year medical student and cofounder of Harambee, a cultural arts celebration for medical students. "A lot of students love humanities and arts. They were in liberal arts before medical school and lost that along the way. It's important to keep them in touch with their own humanity," he says.

But does it work?

Does grounding in the arts make better doctors? Nobody knows. Marshall intends to conduct research on whether an interest in the arts and humanities has any effect on clinician performance. Whatever the findings, the center fills a big hole. "The center," says Pham, "is very important for medical students and an opportunity for our university to show that medicine is much more than drugs and procedures. It's also about compassion and empathy."

As Hallberg puts it: "No matter how technologically based and oriented we become, no matter how focused on the molecular basis of disease, medicine will continue to be as much an art as a science. Thinking broadly, reading widely, being curious about the world and people who inhabit it, those are all essential to creating compassionate and caring physicians."

Surely, Williams, the physician-poet, would agree.

Edited from Medical Bulletin, winter 2007, a publication by the Minnesota Medical Foundation.