Editor's Note
Comfort Care
Medicine is discovering that the arts belong in our daily lives even when, or especially when, we're sick.
Book review by Charles R. Meyer, M.D.
The family had agonized over the decision. For their dad, months of torturous decline had culminated in days of poor nutritional intake that led to hospitalization, IV fluids, aspiration, and cardiac arrest with “successful” resuscitation that left him dependent on BIPAP ventilation. Days of supportive care threatened to stretch into weeks of care that would ultimately be seen as futile. The family finally reached an uneasy agreement to withdraw support in favor of comfort care. I assured them that we would use all of medicine’s tools to achieve that comfort—oxygen, morphine, tranquilizers. Yet when the time for comfort arrived, the family found their own solution. One son, a gifted guitarist and vocalist, brought his instrument to the bedside, and he and the family started singing their father’s favorite hymns. A visible calm settled over their dad as he died.
Music and the other arts have powers that can eclipse the reach of scientific medicine. Anybody who has cried at a movie, stayed up all night reading an entrancing book, or had memories resurrected by the strains of some song knows the emotional power of art. Until recently, music, verse, and visual art have mostly been confined to the concert hall, book, or art museum, with medicine content to find the right pill. But now hospitals and clinics share common ground with guitarists, poets, and painters (p. 40). They have found that the arts, with their power to comfort and even heal, are worth integrating into their environment. In the Twin Cities, Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota has reached out to the nearby Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the MacPhail Center for Music, the Children’s Theater, and other organizations to bring some of the best local talent into its expanding campuses. In other hospitals and even doctors’ offices, the utilitarian motif is gradually going the way of the black bag. Monotone hospital walls now sport lively watercolors or intriguing black-and-white photos. Patient-selected music partially drowns out the noxious noise of MRI machines. Perhaps the white coat is destined to acquire a colorful flair. Medicine is discovering that the arts belong in our daily lives even when, or especially when, we’re sick.
Increasingly, physicians and medical students are embracing the arts for personal and professional enhancement as well. Rolland Pistulka, M.D., took up dancing in his retirement. Native American students and physicians are singing and drumming the songs of their ancestors. Medical students are taking photographs. Sam Willis, M.D., has turned parts of his family medicine clinic into an art gallery. And many are reading and writing. In response to our survey about books that mattered to them, readers described the ones that grabbed a piece of their souls and changed them (p. 24). And our annual writing contest once again led medical students and doctors to put pen creatively to paper (p. 32). A life in medicine need not be a life outside of the arts.
At the memorial service for my parents, who died together in an accident, the Bible readings and eulogies were important, but what carried the service and what sticks with me now is the music. We sang a hymn written by my grandfather to be sung to the tune of Sibelius’ Finlandia. A solo trumpet played the haunting Prayer of St. Gregory by Hovhaness and the lilting Exsultate, jubilate by Mozart. And we left with the sanctuary filled with the last overpowering chords of Widor’s Toccata, the memory of which to this day brings healing joy to my soul.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief Dr. Meyer can be reached at cmeyer1@fairview.org.