70707 - Art, Science and Knowledge

Learning outcomes

Thanks to the empowerment of science between 19th and 20th century, medicine has been able to recognize, diagnose and treat successfully a great amount of diseases, giving the idea that science per se can constitute the core of medicine. As a general agreement, science is either essential or sufficient to cure an ill human being, leaving caregiving outside what we call medicine. Medicine has no longer regarded as an art. Teaching programs of medicine faculties, as well as the procedures for selection of medical students, deal only with biological and scientific competence, but usually have no relationship with other domains of medical profession. However Medicine is still an art. This is not a trivial issue, and some recent contribution on scientific journals addresses this topic. “Medicine is influenced by a host of factors that have little to do with science. It is a socially and culturally embedded dynamic process. It is informed by and inextricably bound up with history, literature, ethics, religion, and philosophy—in short, the concerns of the humanities” (Faith McLellan, The Lancet, Volume 371, Issue 9606, Page 14, 5 January 2008). “The art and science of medicine don't peel off from each other in clean and intact wholes. Taking the patient's history is as much art as science; treatment is pastoral care as well as pharmacological rationality. Prognosis has as much to do with social science data and humanistic interpretation of lives in their social contexts as with the understanding of underlying pathophysiology and pharmacology. The doctor's experience of the world is as important to her caregiving as evidence is to her technical decision-making. No; medicine cannot get away from the confounding art of caregiving, even if the medical profession is not its major source. (…) But where does the knowledge and skill required for caregiving, and to critically reflect on what obstructs doctors from practicing it, come from?” (Arthur Kleinmann The Lancet, Volume 371, Issue 9606, Pages 22 - 23, 5 January 2008). However, there is a further, and more powerful connection between art and medicine, which attains to the origin of both, as methods for understanding and knowing reality.

An analogy between art and science is a subject increasingly discussed in contemporary culture, at the risk of becoming a trite commonplace. This parallel is often advanced both ascribing to science a “creativity” generally associated with artistic production, and assigning to art a “rigour” traditionally connected with the scientific enterprise. Nevertheless, this is seldom followed by a proper appraisal of the euristic and cognitive function accomplished by domains other than the linguistic/mathematical one, and in particular by images.

Science philosophers like N. R. Hanson, T. Kuhn, I. Lakatos and P. Feyerabend have worked at a redefinition of epistemology that brought a better understanding of the factors that can participate in the genesis of a conjecture and on the strategies employed to promote and defend a theory, among which a significant function is performed by various modes of visualization of reality.

Taking into account these arguments, the course “Ars Medica” is intended to develop the basis to understand these concepts, and at the same time to use images from art, to support and promote new attitudes and methods with which learn and grow as physician and nurses, not only during the university, but also in the building of his/her personal professional experience, either as clinician or researcher.

 

Course contents

February 26 from 4pm to 7pm;

February 27 from 9 am to 1pm; from 3pm to 6pm

February 28 from 9 am to noon

March 2,7, 23 from 4pm to 7pm

March 16 from 3pm to 5pm

Venue: AULA MAGNA PATOLOGIA GENERALE - AULA 1st floor, Via San Giacomo, 14

Official language: Italian, however, English speech from selected invited Speakers is expected, without translation.

The themes treated are the following:

•          Art, science and knowledge

•          The diseased man and the disease

•          Pain and suffering

•          Quest for salubrity, quest for salvation

•          To cure as an aid to take care

•          The surprising birth of the hospitals and the new challenges

•          Medicine and scientific enterprise

•          Diagnostic method and scientific discovery

•          To teach and to learn (Masters and disciples): responsibility in education

•          Resources and needs: responsibility in management

•          Craft, technique and technology

•          The dimensions of the care.

It isn't a course of history of medicine, neither of history of art, even though it encompasses both and tries to show the beauty of our profession, despite the ugliness of pain and suffering.

Lesson #1 provides an introduction about the relationship among art, science and knowledge, using interactive methods coupled with frontal speeches; an emphasis is given also to the meaning of disease and suffering, and to the needs that are involved within the desire of health. The last lesson gives some conclusive remarks, and is followed by the final test. Lessons #2 to #4 are split into two parts. In the first one, some concept are given using visual art (sometimes music);  in the second part, a trained physician (clinician, researcher) or nurse recalls the message by giving his/her professional experience.

Readings/Bibliography

The Lancet, Volume 371, Issue 9606, Page 14, 5 January 2008

The Lancet, Volume 376, Issue 9740, Page 500, 14 August 2010

Teaching methods

Basic learning comes from a conducted tour among some hundred of art images about disease, cure, care, suffering and dying, but also improving and healing; the lessons speak about human relationships, struggles to overcome problems, efforts to reply to the need of health. It tries to show what is needed to achieve those results, and the reasons why foreign people take care of each other: when it did start, and when, what and how has been lost.

Assessment methods

Text on 8th March 4-5.30 pm

Teaching tools

slides and videos

Office hours

See the website of Francesca Bisulli