Arts and Health

The arts are an important discipline within the discipline of medical humanities. Our people are involved in the University Medical Center’s medical humanities curriculum, in particular through the project “Patients and Paintings”. Health and wellbeing is also an important concern of the department’s research.

A recent example of work done within the department is an article titled 'Making Dementia Matter Through Sound' and co-authored by Chris Tonelli. It explores the working practices of the Genetic Choir in Amsterdam and its 'Stem&Luister' project. This initiative aimed to use voice, sound and improvisation in order to better connect with people suffering from dementia, improving their experience of care.

Project: Patients and Paintings

Patients and Paintings (Chairgroup of Art History and University Museum) Looking at art sharpens your visual analytical skills and can make you a better doctor. Already in the late 1990s, the Yale and Harvard Universities offered programs in their museums for doctors and medical students to enhance visual literacy through art. But art can also foster empathy - another much-needed skill in medical care, for which there is only little time reserved in medical curricula. The face-to-face encounter with painted, sculpted or drawn human bodies allows you to experience how quickly you judge another human individual on the basis of beauty, ugliness, age, death, injury, gender, illness, or signs of disability and mutilation. Students learn how quickly they act upon intuitive judgments and how they can render their observations consciously and reflexively. For encounters to be effective, the actual material presence of art works is paramount: only the real thing can be observed, analyzed, understood and cared for, as if it were  - almost but not quite - a real person. Working together with contemporary artists and the Groninger Museum, we offer lectures and workshops within the Medicine in Context weeks to all bachelor students following the medical curriculum of the faculty of medical sciences to enhance visual literacy and empathic awareness through art.

Researchers

• Prof. Dr. Barend van Heusden holds the chair in culture and cognition, with special reference to the arts. His research focuses on the representation of experience in arts and on arts education
• Dr. Joost Keizer explores the relationship artistic and medical theories in early modern art.
• Prof. Dr. Ann-Sophie Lehmann holds the chair of art history & material culture, and is director of the Patients and Paintings project
• Rolf ter Sluis is curator at the university museum and closely cooperates with researchers from the centre for health and humanities.
• Dr. Sara Strandvad focuses on cultural production processes and the way objects influence the social settings of their making
• Dr. Chris Tonelli works on music and health
• Prof. Dr. Cor Wagenaar holds the chair in the history and theory of architecture and urbanism, and is director of the Expertise Centre Architecture, Urbanism, Health