Prescribing art in medicine
The group of students and doctors hovered around “Pieta,” the sculpture of Mary cradling a dying Jesus, as if they had a real patient. With eyes to the injuries and to the comforting arms, they debated whether the cloth in Mary’s hands was for wiping her own tears or cleaning his bloodied body. “I initially didn’t even want to look at this sculpture because it was so jarring,” said Lisa Wong from the back of the crowd gathered on the fourth floor of the Harvard Art Museums to look at the Austrian sculpture. “(But) our initial human instinct of revulsion has to be overcome before we are able to truly see, then care for the patient.” Such was the powerful beginning to the Wintersession course “Creativity, Medicine and the Arts,” an afternoon of workshops led by Wong, a pediatrician and co-director of the Arts and Humanities Initiative at Harvard Medical...