The Arts as Medicine? New Histories of the Arts and Health
Lead Research Organisation:
Lancaster University
Department Name: History
Abstract
Today, there is growing interest in using the arts to improve health, whether through the branch of psychiatry known as art therapy, or through community-based practices such as social prescribing. However, the history of the interconnections between the arts and health remains poorly understood. So far, little work has been done that looks either outside Europe and North America, or earlier than the 18th century. Moreover, the vast majority of scholarship on the arts and health tends to focus on a single medium or discipline, with little exchange between scholars focusing separately on practices such as music, literature, the visual arts, and dance.
In addition, recent developments in both scholarship and practice call into question the assumptions underpinning the modern European focus of the few histories currently available. On the one hand, historians of science and medicine have grown increasingly aware that Europeans of the early modern period saw phenomena such as paintings, literary texts, and music, as having physical effects on both mind and body. In so doing, they suggest that pre-modern Europeans understood the arts as tools for healing, and that they did not distinguish as sharply between psychological and bodily health as became the norm in the 19th and 20th centuries. Similarly, scholars working on pre-modern China and Persia have shown that concepts such as harmony underpinned therapeutic uses of media such as art and music. Once again, such histories call into question modern European categorizations of aesthetic experience, medicine, and the mind-body distinction. Moreover, recent research in neuroscience supports some of these pre-modern ideas, with many scientists studying aesthetic experiences involving the body as well as the mind.
The Arts as Medicine project will thus seek out new geographies, periodizations, and methods for studying the links between the histories of art, aesthetics, and health. Through a series of three workshops and two public events, it will enable scholars, practitioners, and the public to share global and early modern perspectives that have so far been overshadowed in the history of the arts and health. In particular, it will seek to overcome the difficulties imposed by disciplinary fragmentation by facilitating interactions between specialists in music, literature, the visual arts, dance, and the neurosciences - specialists who have much to gain from a greater awareness of each other's expertise. Furthermore, the project engages with ongoing transformations in art therapy, philosophy of mind, and neuroscience. In particular, we will seek to foster awareness among humanities scholars of: 1. neuroscience research examining the role of the whole body in our cognitive processes as well as the impact of the environment on the workings of that mind-body; 2. healthcare practices that increasingly emphasize holistic approaches that integrate health and wellbeing with broader social phenomena. Such developments challenge the 19th- and 20th-century vision psychiatric vision of art therapy that has been the object of most scholarly attention, encouraging us to seek out new intersections between present approaches to the arts and health and their antecedents in the past.
The project will therefore benefit a wide range of humanities scholars, including historians of health and medicine, historians of art, literary scholars, and musicologists. Moreover, the project will foster interdisciplinary engagement between those scholars and neuroscientists, as well as theorists and practitioners of the arts and health. What is more, the project will use public events at The Storey (Lancaster) and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh to promote public awareness of the arts and health.
In addition, recent developments in both scholarship and practice call into question the assumptions underpinning the modern European focus of the few histories currently available. On the one hand, historians of science and medicine have grown increasingly aware that Europeans of the early modern period saw phenomena such as paintings, literary texts, and music, as having physical effects on both mind and body. In so doing, they suggest that pre-modern Europeans understood the arts as tools for healing, and that they did not distinguish as sharply between psychological and bodily health as became the norm in the 19th and 20th centuries. Similarly, scholars working on pre-modern China and Persia have shown that concepts such as harmony underpinned therapeutic uses of media such as art and music. Once again, such histories call into question modern European categorizations of aesthetic experience, medicine, and the mind-body distinction. Moreover, recent research in neuroscience supports some of these pre-modern ideas, with many scientists studying aesthetic experiences involving the body as well as the mind.
The Arts as Medicine project will thus seek out new geographies, periodizations, and methods for studying the links between the histories of art, aesthetics, and health. Through a series of three workshops and two public events, it will enable scholars, practitioners, and the public to share global and early modern perspectives that have so far been overshadowed in the history of the arts and health. In particular, it will seek to overcome the difficulties imposed by disciplinary fragmentation by facilitating interactions between specialists in music, literature, the visual arts, dance, and the neurosciences - specialists who have much to gain from a greater awareness of each other's expertise. Furthermore, the project engages with ongoing transformations in art therapy, philosophy of mind, and neuroscience. In particular, we will seek to foster awareness among humanities scholars of: 1. neuroscience research examining the role of the whole body in our cognitive processes as well as the impact of the environment on the workings of that mind-body; 2. healthcare practices that increasingly emphasize holistic approaches that integrate health and wellbeing with broader social phenomena. Such developments challenge the 19th- and 20th-century vision psychiatric vision of art therapy that has been the object of most scholarly attention, encouraging us to seek out new intersections between present approaches to the arts and health and their antecedents in the past.
The project will therefore benefit a wide range of humanities scholars, including historians of health and medicine, historians of art, literary scholars, and musicologists. Moreover, the project will foster interdisciplinary engagement between those scholars and neuroscientists, as well as theorists and practitioners of the arts and health. What is more, the project will use public events at The Storey (Lancaster) and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh to promote public awareness of the arts and health.
Description | This award is still in progress, and is due to finish at the end of April 2025, following the final workshop (the award end date was extended by two months, from February to April 2025). Nevertheless, it is possible to outline some provisional findings of this Networking Grant. The purpose of this grant was to bring together scholars working on the links between the arts and health in the early modern period, i.e. from around 1300 to around 1800. A key purpose of the project was to figure out what concepts and terminologies should be used to talk about the links between the arts and health at times and places where the dominant modern, western understandings of both those terms had not yet been established. In particular, we wanted to understand what links were established between artistic practices and health before the emergence of philosophical aesthetics in the 18th century, which tended to exclude bodily pleasures and pains from its accounts of aesthetic experience. So far, we have found that - across a range of contexts in both Europe and East Asia - early modern thinkers frequently conceptualised the effects of the arts on the body in terms of habituation, i.e. the slow internalization of the virtues of qualities of art objects through repeated patterns of sensory engagement. As a result, we have used the flexibility afforded by the Networking Grant format to devote the last of our workshops to this theme. We expect that this workshop will make it possible to develop a larger-scale grant application for a project on histories of habit and health. Moreover, we anticipate that this engagement with the role of habit in both health and the arts will have significant potential for engagement and impact work. |
Exploitation Route | The outcomes of this funding have potential relevance to scholars working broadly on health and the body, and to people working in public health seeking to produce better health outcomes through habit-forming practices such as social prescribing. Conversations with partners in the Morecambe Bay NHS trust and local charities suggest a strong appetite to use our work on the arts, habit, and health as the springboard for institutional and public-facing work designed to improve health outcomes through creative practices. |
Sectors | Creative Economy Education Healthcare Leisure Activities including Sports Recreation and Tourism Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
Description | The findings from this research have so far had two non-academic impacts: 1. The findings from this research have influenced the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Library's approach to making its collections accessible to the public. Together, we collaborated on a pamphlet highlighting the links between the arts and health in iterms from the RCPE's library and archive collections. The pamphlet reflected the project's finding that pre-modern ideas about the arts and health were significantly more embodied/less psychological than the asylum based approaches to art therapy that emerged in the 19th century. As a result, the pamphlet encouraged readers to identify links between pre-modern practices and those currently emerging in today's arts and health practices, as well as in the neurosciences. The team at the RCPE Library have suggested that this pamphlet could form part of a larger exhibition collaboration, following the renovation and expansion of the RCPE's exhibition space. 2. The project's findings also informed a workshop for children on the arts and health that took place on February 16, 2025. This workshop was organised in collaboration with a local charity that organizes activities for children - Escape2Make. The workshop sought to help students understand how artistic creativity can be good for both mental and bodily health. It did so by linking historical examples of the arts being used as medicine to a pair of present-day experiments. These experiments consisted of a test of the effects of music on heart-rate, and an experiment in which the children painted emotions and then exchanged paintings with each other to see if they could decipher the emotion that their partner had depicted. The workshop received positive feedback from participants and from Escape2Make's team, and Escape2Make are keen to further integrate arts and health activities into their programming. 3. At this early stage, it is hard to tell precisely what the project's academic impact will be. We expect things to become clearer as we prepare our publications for press. |
First Year Of Impact | 2024 |
Sector | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
Impact Types | Cultural |
Description | Partnership with the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt |
Organisation | Max Planck Society |
Department | Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics |
Country | Germany |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | We held the first of our workshops at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. |
Collaborator Contribution | The Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics provided free room space, expertise, and catering to facilitate the first project workshop. |
Impact | All the project workshops are the result of collaboration with the MPIWG because the co-investigator is based there. But the first workshop involved direct in-kind contributions from the MPIWG as well. |
Start Year | 2024 |
Description | Partnership with the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Library |
Organisation | Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | We brought the second of our workshops to the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. In addition, we made a pamphlet about the history of arts and health in the collections of the RCPE Library. |
Collaborator Contribution | The RCPE provided free, prestigious room space for the second workshop, and gave us access to archival and print items from their collection. |
Impact | Pamphlet on the history of arts and health based on the RCPE Library collections. |
Start Year | 2024 |
Description | Pamphlet on Arts and Health for the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | As part of our collaboration with the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, I put together a pamphlet highlighting and explaining items in the RCPE Library's historic collections relating to the histories of the arts and health. Based on themes arising from the project's first two workshops, this pamphlet identified items in the RCPE Library collections where the arts had a medical or therapeutic functions. In addition, the pamphlet communicated one of the project's key findings. We have found that pre-modern thinkers tended to think about the effects of the arts and health in embodied terms - that they sometimes saw art as a medicament whose effects could be understood in physical terms. The pamphlet therefore highlighted this aspect of pre-modern thought, as well as pointing out its renewed relevance in today's approaches to the arts and health. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
Description | Workshop on Arts and Health with Escape2Make |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Third sector organisations |
Results and Impact | I organized this activity along with Escape2Make, a charity that puts on creative and education activities in Lancaster, UK. The event consisted of a 1) workshop examining the history of the links between art and health; 2) two art-science experiments to help the children grasp the links between art and health; and 3) a mural painting workshop in which the children put those ideas into practice. The event was for 15 children, and received positive feedback from the children, who described it as "brilliant" and talked about how "in drawing you can express your feelings". The organisers at Escape2Make also claimed that the event helped them to think differently about how to link the arts to health, and wish to undertake more such activities - both independently and in collaboration with us if possible. The senior production manager at Escape2Make wrote "I felt that the work we did with you was important. Exploring the connection between the arts and mental health is something E2M are very interested in and would love to collaborate more in the future to continue exploring this." |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |