Blog post written by Katey Warran, Olivia Turner, and Emily Davis
Over the last 3 months, we’ve been exploring the topic of connection and disconnection between critical medical humanities and arts & health. Dr Olivia Turner recently joined PATHS research group as Deputy, and she is an artist and researcher with a background in medical humanities. This has prompted many discussions in our team about the potential tensions, opportunities for shared learning, areas of overlap, and theoretical complexities in bringing together scholars from across the medical humanities and arts & health, and how doing so could enable interesting avenues for future research. We wanted to explore the histories of these respective areas of research, how and why they may be different, and why bringing them together may be important. In this blog, we reflect on a research group discussion we held in August 2024, alongside our ongoing conversations and reflections on this topic.
Olivia facilitated the group discussion on the history of the medical humanities, highlighting in particular two important ‘turns’ in the field – the critical turn and the visual turn. These turns have rapidly shifted discussions in the medical humanities in the UK: from the pedagogic role that humanities can play in supporting the aims of medicine and health regarding treatment and prevention to how the humanities can disrupt and critique knowledge hierarchies, systems and values and how the visual arts can offer a different mode of understanding. For example, delving more deeply into the embodied, aesthetic, and sensorial aspects of health and medicine, recognising the ‘whole’ person. While in arts & health, the shifts in discourse and priorities have not been so well-articulated as ‘turns’ – and indeed perhaps the changes have been more incremental across the field – we reflect that the desire to embed arts-based ways of knowing into research and to be critical have become more prevalent in recent years.
Connection and disconnection: where can we come together?
A key point of connection that we discussed was the endeavour of those working within and across the critical medical humanities and arts & health to push against biomedical understandings of health and illness. Within the critical medical humanities, biomedicine has been described as supporting ‘overly reductive, materialist and scientistic definitions of human experience’ (Viney et al., 2015). Rather than being a ‘supportive friend’ to biomedicine, which would merely uphold existing medical hierarchies, critical medical humanities has sought to ‘promote fearless questioning’, challenge authority, and push epistemological boundaries (Viney et al., 2015). In arts & health, the endeavour has been to broaden out narrow definitions of health and illness, seeking to move from deficit models to asset-based approaches. In order to utilise the arts to incite social change and reduce inequalities in health, it has been argued that the arts need to be viewed as ‘liberating social assets’ (Parkinson, 2019). The arts are not merely an instrumental tool to ‘fix’ health problems, but they can be part of the social fabric of our lives, supporting flourishing, health, and wellness.
Yet, there is also a potential disconnect here in the ways in which the medical humanities and arts & health seek to push against biomedical approaches. The critical medical humanities have been firm in their articulation of wanting to challenge a ‘servile vision of medical humanities’ that would solely serve the interests of those within the health and social care system (Viney et al., 2015). While those in arts & health have declared desires to change health and social care systems in ways that integrate the arts (e.g., social prescribing, arts-on-prescription, reducing systemic inequalities), the majority of research has sought to support current systems through increasing the evidence base, rather than seeking to disrupt or change systems, or challenge understandings of what constitutes health. For example, working with policymakers and other decision-makers to integrate the arts into health.
Many people working across the medical humanities and arts & health also share an endeavour to more firmly celebrate ‘art’ as a practice, methodology, and method. The ‘visual turn’ in the medical humanities pushes against an instrumental version of the arts that seek to produce empathetic doctors, instead embracing ambiguity and embodied perceptual experience (Johnstone, 2018). Within arts & health, the desire to centre the arts is more expansive than just the visual arts, drawing upon a wide range artistic and creative practices to understand, experience and explore holistic health and multidimensional wellbeing. But, aligning with the critical focus of the visual turn in the medical humanities, Williams et al. (2022) have argued that there is still a need to centre critical reflection and artistic practice, rather than to merely position the arts in terms of their utility to meet institutional norms. Further, there is a growing body of scholarship focusing on the importance of arts-based methods in the literature on ageing (e.g., Herron et al., 2023). While in arts & health the literature is less cohesive, with no articulated ‘turn’ as per medical humanities, we also reflect on our own recent discussions in the field of arts & health, recognising that there are emerging discourses that seek to further embed the role of ‘art’ as method in the field.
Yet, another key point of disconnection between the fields seems to be the primary contexts in which the discourses of biomedicine and health are (de)constructed. Within medical humanities, scholars are often pushed and pulled by literature and discourses in medical education and academia, whereby the ‘instrumental’ use of the arts is to ‘improve’ the education of medical doctors. By contrast, scholars in arts & health tend to be orienting their work to discourses in policy and practice, concerning the funding and roll out of arts programmes that may support health and the priorities of arts organisations. Discussions of the ‘instrumental’ here centre around the utility of the arts to meet health outcomes within a medical model (Macnaughton et al., 2005). While there are nuances and overlaps here, it seems that the social worlds of the medical humanities and arts & health are somewhat different, with different points of contention and different agendas.
Looking to the future
Despite the different contexts and histories of the medical humanities and arts & health, the shared values across these disciplines are clear. They both present a desire to work towards positive social change, to question medical hierarchies of evidence, and to place ‘art’ at the centre of inquiry as we look to the future. There are many avenues for future knowledge-exchange. Perhaps the medical humanities could draw on the diverse creative practices of arts & health to expand their vision of ‘art' as central, and those in arts & health could further embrace the criticality inherent in the visual turn to question the central role of medical models in the field.
We advocate for increased dialogue between those working across these interconnected fields so that we can work together to identify shared areas of interest, gaps in the field, and to foster new ways of thinking and doing research.
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Featured image credit © Dovecot Studios, University of Edinburgh. An intricate and innovative tapestry by Christine Borland, honouring the first women allowed to matriculate at a university in Britain. On display at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Read more here.
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