Patients As Art

Patients as Art explores the capacity of art to provide a unique perspective on the history of humankind. Fearturing over 160 full-color works of art, this book offers a pictorial review of medical history stretching from Paleolithic times to the present, reflecting the ideals and sensibilities of the times in which they were created, and communicating formal, spiritual, and scientific values. Rarely have experts considered the potential clinical implications of such works or their collective value as an archive of medical history. Many prominent works of art have depicted aspects of medicine's long struggle against ignorance, superstition, and religious and political dogma to emerge as one of mankind's greatest achievements. The particular works included in this book were chosen both for their esthetic appeal and for the skill with which they depict important developments in medicine over time. Dr. Mackowiak reveals what these works have to say about the status of the "art of medicine" in the past, and its relationship to the medicine of today.

Patients as Art: Forty Thousand Years of Medical History in Drawings, Paintings, and Sculpture traces the history of medicine through works of art stretching from the Paleolithic period to the present. Long before humans could write, before they had a medical science or possibly even a religion, they had art. Where works of art have involved patients, they have provided insight beyond aspects of sickness and health and life and death that can never be explained by science alone—humanistic aspects of the patient experience that can’t be measured or weighed or dissected. The works analyzed in this book, each of which features one or more patients, were chosen for their esthetic appeal and for the skill with which they depict important developments in medicine over time. Together they offer a compelling perspective on the history of medicine that reflects the outward expressions of artists’ innermost feelings and personal prejudices. In analyzing these works, medical historian Dr. Philip Mackowiak brings the perspective of an internist with over four decades of experience caring for patients, teaching doctors-in-training, and conducting clinical research.

A renowned diagnostician shares stories of his patients and explores the importance of the human factor in medicine. In The Art of Medicine, Toronto Western Hospital’s internist Dr. Herbert Ho Ping Kong draws on his vast dossier of personal cases and five decades as a clinician to examine the core principles of a patient-centered approach to diagnosis and treatment. While HPK, as he is fondly known, recognizes and applauds the many invaluable innovations in medical technology, he makes the point that as disease and its management grow increasingly complex, physicians must learn to develop an arsenal of more basic skills, actively using the arts of seeing, hearing, palpation, empathy, and advocacy to provide a more humane and holistic form of care. Aimed at medical practitioners, aspiring doctors, or anyone interested in health and medicine, this book also contains interviews with more than a dozen of HPK’s patients, as well as short essays that explore the thinking of his professional colleagues on the art of medicine.

This text explores the use of commissioned artwork in hospitals through the dual lens of an artist and healthcare professional, identifying 15 distinct 'purposes' of art in hospitals and arguing for the need for greater variety in art offerings that serve the diverse needs of patients, families, visitors and hospital staff.

Fully illustrated with hundreds of artworks, this guide explores depictions of illness and healing in Western art.

No one is more conscious of the faults of this work than the author. Therefore some self -criticism should be woven into this foreward. There are two possible methodologically pure solutions to this book's theme: a de scriptive catalog of the pictures couched in the language of natural science and accom panied by a clinical and psychopathological description of the patients, or a completely metaphysically based investigation of the process of pictorial composition. According to the latter, these unusual works, explained psychologically, and the exceptional circum stances on which they are based would be integrated as a playful variation of human expression into a total picture of the ego under the concept of an inborn creative urge, behind which we would then only have to discover a universal need for expression as an instinctive foundation. In brief, such an investigation would remain in the realm of phenomenologically observed existential forms, completely independent of psychiatry and aesthetics. The compromise between these two pure solutions must necessarily be piecework and must constantly defend itself against the dangers of fragmentation. We are in danger of being satisfied with pure description, the novelistic expansion of details and questions of principle; pitfalls would be very easy to avoid if we had the use of a clearly outlined method. But the problems of a new, or at least never seriously worked, field defy the methodology of every established subject.

The second edition of Putting Patients First showcases what Planetree facilities and the Planetree organization have learned about the commitments, conditions, practices, and policies that are needed to do more than give lip service to being--patient-centered.--It should be read by every student, nurse, physician, administrator, trustee, policy maker, and lay person who is committed to creating healing environments, holding facilities accountable for their rhetoric, and truly reforming health care.