The Art of Healing and the Healing of Art

We admire the ability to heal, and rightly so. It takes great skill to fix and repair the human body. To stitch torn skin or muscle back together, to rid the body of disease and infection, to restore wellness, opportunity and life, if we can. Medicine is in many ways an art, an art of healing. Healing that not only requires analytic skills and knowledge, but creativity and empathy. The healer is an artist.

This art is practised alongside ever-growing biotechnology and diagnostic tools. Machines that enable us to see further than the bruised flesh, to analyse marrow and beyond. Tools that help us to see ourselves at the deepest physical layer. Technology also helps us to create medicines and vaccines, ways of eradicating nasty microbes that can hold the world to ransom.

Art and medicine are similar. Both help us to see ourselves at a deeper level. To understand our vulnerabilities, our existence and our fears. Think about the surgeon adept with their blade. Their ability to open the human body and reveal the culprit of the pain, like Sherlock Holmes. To excise illness from the human body. To dig deep. Although we revere the surgeon, we also fear a rendezvous with their knife.

Let us consider a question then, what makes us healthy?

Is it the surgeon, the dose of medicine, is it the hospital and its technology?

Is it your connection with others? A walk through nature? A story that makes you think about the nature of existence?

The idea of Salutogenic well-being asks us to think about what makes us well, what promotes our health. It asks us to think about what keeps us alive, not merely what makes us ill. Gone is the focus on wretchedness, we now recognise not just the biological dimensions of health but the psychological and social dimensions too. Prevention and promotion. Connection. Security and rights. Justice. Things that can help us, to an extent, avoid the surgeon’s blade.

And Art.

Art can be medicine. Jackson Pollock’s number 5 in a vial. A cure for social isolation, a means of connection to history, culture and other people. An opportunity for mindfulness. A chance to create and appreciate. A means of connecting with characters and stories and complexity, to build empathy through moral imagination. Art can be a means of promoting health, whether it is through art therapy or art appreciation.  

As a part of the biopsychosocial model of health, art can play an important conceptual role. The healer is an artist, and the artist is a healer.

Dr Connal Lee