The Arts as Medicine? New Histories of the Arts and Health

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.