The Arts and Medicine
by Rachel H. Kowalsky MD, A Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physician in NYC
The Arts and Medicine
By Dr. Rachel Kowalsky
What is the place of the arts in medicine? You can’t close a wound with words, or prescribe a poem in place of antibiotics. And yet for me, a pediatric emergency physician in New York City, the two crafts have always been intimately related. The arts describe what it’s like to be alive. They help us connect with and understand our patients, ourselves, and the world in which we practice. So it’s natural to turn to the arts as a method of healing during the Covid-19 pandemic.
March 2020 was a time of uncertainty and fear. Waves of alarming information flew around the news, the internet, and landed in my email, constantly upending my train of thought, throwing off the inner calm that I’d cultivated over thirteen years of practice in the emergency department. On a single morning, a revised patient flow algorithm, a guidance document on safe re-use of personal protective equipment, instructions for using a specially adapted intubation kit, and a foreign press release about dead healthcare workers all landed in my inbox within minutes of one other. These communications often left me short of breath, heart racing.
The only messages that didn’t have this effect on me were from an online Literature and Medicine group I belong to, affiliated with the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. In that space, professors of literature, philosophy, and the humanities were sharing bits of searingly beautiful poetry and prose that slowed my heart rate and cleared my mind. They pointed out that humanity already has a vocabulary for the emotions we experience around pandemics: fear, hope, panic, menace, misinformation, trust. Most importantly, I found that the written word could still make me feel good, even joyful, despite the awful truth of a changed world.
All this reminded me of Frederick, a children’s book character created by Leo Lionni. He gathered words and images all summer long, and when winter came, he used them to sustain and connect his friends. The book was one of my favorites growing up. I loved the idea that words counted and had impact; they could bring solace, happiness, and abundance into spaces where those qualities were otherwise absent. As a bookworm and a writer, I’ve also been continually reassured by Leo Lionni’s message: poets, and the arts, matter. In fact, they are foundational to a healthy, resilient society. The arts are the moral and aesthetic platform that inform the way we live our lives. They sustain us when winter comes early or stays too long.
The arts aren’t the center of our daily work, and they can’t be. Our work is immediate, fast paced, and leaves little time for rumination. But our actions are always informed by what we’ve read, what we’ve seen, and what we have deeply felt in the presence of artists. The arts tell the truth about what we feel before we even know we have felt it. They put words to the raw emotions just beginning to take form inside us. They affirm our emotions as real, valid; they hold a mirror up to them and show them to us again. They remind us of the extreme beauty inherent to the smallest experiences: greeting a patient, even over a screen. Greeting a loved one, even over a screen. They are an experience we share. And they tell the truth from wherever they are. The arts live at the edges and corners of our work, but they are the cornerstone of our craft. In this sense, they are critical to what we do, and to making it through this pandemic with grace and resilience.
We already know how to do this. Words are free, and they are at our immediate disposal. Read like your life depends on it, write like only your heart knows how.
