For my next spotlight feature into Medicine, Arts, Humanities resources I am going to turn to another of my early inspirations, Out of Our Heads (OOOH) – art in medicine online’ hosted by the University of Bristol Medical School.
The site, run by a group of GPs, educators, and developers shares over 500 artworks created by medical students, doctors, and patients.
You can search artforms, medical specialties, and medical diagnoses to find artworks reflecting your own interests or circumstances. There are a wealth of interesting artworks to explore.
Years ago, I was particularly drawn to a piece by Megan Fileman (2010) titled On the Outside. It is a sculpture, a figure in blue sat huddled under a glass as a figure in red peers in. Fileman accompanies her piece with a description. She writes;
… the sculpture is intended to illustrate the difficulty of giving support and comfort to someone when they are suffering, particularly when their experience is something that you can sympathise with but are unable to empathise with – because you yourself have not experienced it. (Fileman, 2010).
It struck a chord and I return to that image regularly. For me, it happens to capture the essence of my relationship with the field of medicine, arts, and humanities. My personal quest to try and understand my colleagues, who are medical professionals, who have endured trauma and experiences that I have not and will not. It’s a reminder too of the helplessness one can feel when someone you encounter is suffering in plain sight but is seemingly unreachable. You want to break the glass, but you cannot.
OOOH is linked to Bristol Medical School and “since 2004, medical students at the University of Bristol have been required as part of their core curriculum to submit creative works for assessment” (Thompson et al, 2010).
There are a number of medical school curriculums that embrace the arts and humanities. Bristol also appear to offer an intercalated BA in Medical Humanities, welcoming medical, dental, and veterinary students. Intercalated courses or creative additions to the curriculum offer students an avenue to explore their own learning and develop a wider skill base.
The academic discourse around medicine, arts, and humanities often attempts to justify and defend why this field is relevant and worthy of engagement. There are debates on what is included in the field too. Alan Bleakley, in Medicine, health and the arts: Approaches to the medical humanities, identifies four “contested and fragmented fields” and goes on to list them as:
The humanities studying medicine
Arts and humanities intersecting with medical education
Arts for health
Arts therapies
(Bleakley, 2014)
These fields can intersect somewhat and to me the OOOH project straddles a number of them.
So, what do the minds behind OOOH think and what do they believe it adds to the student doctor experience? Thompson et al write;
In terms of their future career as doctors, creative development may enhance their professional practice. Students will, for example, be engaging with complexity and uncertainty, facing new problems never encountered before, making sense of patient narratives and explaining diagnoses or lack of them, hopefully in ways that are useful to patients (Thompson et al 2010).
As noted, the collection of artworks on display at OOOH are vast and varied. The recent Covid-19 pandemic has been a prolific influencer of recent submissions that make for thought provoking content.
Linked below is a short film titled Disconnected (Saunders et al 2020) about the experience of using remote consulting during the pandemic.
Another artist, Lydia Wells (2021) created a short film titled 10 Minutes that illustrates some of the challenges of conducting ten-minute consultations in general practice.
Finally, I’ll highlight Beth Rooney, Katie Tan and Max Goldstone’s painting titled Sleep (2019) which articulates the strain and burden doctors bear.
Lots more to explore at outofourheads.net so I strongly encourage you to visit the site and explore them.
To be clear, I am in no way affiliated with the OOOH project or Bristol Medical School.
If you would like to explore more resources please browse the Medicine, Arts, Humanities Resource List. I have compiled a list that includes centres and associations, other resource lists, books, TV shows and films, graphic medicine, and more. The list is not exhaustive and resources are being added all the time. My hope is that you will use the list as a springboard for your own research, either as a medical professional, student, patient, or enthusiast.
You can search for keywords, you can browse by topic or filter by resource type. Check out the short tutorial here.
The list is hosted in Notion, but you do not need a Notion account to view it.
You can buy some of the listed books from our UK Shop via Bookshop.org. Link here Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.
References:
Bleakley, Alan in: Bates, Victoria et al (eds). Medicine, health and the arts: Approaches to the medical humanities. Routledge, 2014.
Fileman, Megan. On the Outside. Outofourheads.net, 2010
Rooney, Beth et al. Sleep. Outofourheads.net, 2019
Saunders, Izzy et al. Disconnected. Outofourheads.net, 2020
Thompson, Trevor, Lamont-Robinson, Catherine, Younie, Louise. ‘Compulsory creativity’: rationales, recipes, and results in the placement of mandatory creative endeavour in a medical undergraduate curriculum. Medical Education Online, 15:1, 5394, 2010
Wells, Lydia. 10 Minutes. Outofourheads.net, 2021
Medicine Arts Humanities 