Week 3 - Medicine + Technology + Art

The integration of medical technology and art is something that has never been immediately obvious to me. I’ve always viewed medicine as a very dry field, only serving to accomplish its mission of healing others without care for aesthetic beauty.

Then, like seemingly every other situation I’ve run into, I found a few examples within the musical world I inhabit. The first thing that came to mind was a person known as Genesis P-Orridge. Without going into too much detail, this person took part in an elaborate experiment with h/er then-wife by undergoing several surgeries so that the two would become extremely close to becoming the same person. In the New York Magazine article “I Am My Own Wife,” P-Orridge and author Erica Orden described the process as “little to do with sex or vanity, and more to do with behavioral science—testing the boundaries of identity, redirecting the way ‘other people encode their expectations and their needs on you.’” It’s the kind of thing that to be honest, seems super over-the-top for an artistic endeavor, but I also respect it in a way for trampling over gender boundaries that were surely much more rigid twenty years ago compared to now.

Before and after of Genesis P-Orrdige. Pretty wild!

I then decided to check out Virgil Wong’s TED talk on his company, Medical Avatar. After looking into their website, one of their apps that really stood out to me was the 3-D Medical Animations, which provides 3D modeling of the human body along with short narration to go for it. I thought that was a pretty rad way to bridge the gap between the uber-science understanding that medical school gives its students and the basic knowledge that most people possess, which hopefully makes the patients more aware of what’s going on in their bodies and what effects medicine will have on them.

Impaled, a medically themed death metal band. Yet another combination of the arts and medicine that you may not have seen coming.

This 3-D imaging technology is already being seeing as a viable form of combining art and medical tech according to Forbes in an article that shows off Dr. Salvatore Mangione, who earned a greater living from his detailed medical sketches and images rather than his own practice. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder where we are currently lacking in the medical field. Is it possible that we have enough physicians, but not enough right-brain thinkers in the medical field that can pull a 180 on the way we approach the field?

According to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the answer is probably! I found out that they have a whole department dedicated to the topic of Art as Applied to Medicine. That’s two years of master’s degree level courses dedicated to nothing but visual arts as applied to medicine. That’s about as blunt a combination of the two as I can think of.

Works Cited

"Arts, Humanities and Medicine Program." Arts, Humanities and Medicine. Stanford School of Medicine, n.d. Web. 14 July 2014.

Glatter, MD Robert. "Can Studying Art Help Medical Students Become Better Doctors?" Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 20 Oct. 2013. Web. 14 July 2014.

Orden, Erica. "I Am My Own Wife." NYMag.com. New York Media LLC, 6 Sept. 2009. Web. 14 July 2014.

"WELCOME TO THE DEPARTMENT OF Art as Applied to Medicine." Art as Applied to Medicine. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, n.d. Web. 14 July 2014.

Wong, Virgil. "Virgil Wong and the Medical Avatar at TED." TED Full Spectrum. Maritime Hotel, New York City. 24 May 2011. Lecture.