Pulse
Briefs
Artistic Sanctuary
Tucked between the towering medical buildings on the University of Minnesota campus, Grace University Lutheran Church stands as a reminder of the spiritual in the shadows of the scientific.
Several times a year, health sciences faculty, staff, and students, as well as members of the congregation and the community settle into the oak pews of the historic, red-brick church on Harvard Street to spend a Friday noon hour pondering some of the knottier issues in medicine—the way we view and treat the elderly, the needs of returning veterans, the ethical obligations of physicians during wartime.
Each session of what has come to be known as the Harvard Street Forum begins with live music appropriate to the topic (for example, a gospel singer for a discussion about the ethics of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and a brass quintet for a session on the needs of returning veterans) followed by a talk or dramatic reading that gets participants thinking about issues that affect them as citizens and health care providers.
“We wanted to provide a forum where conscience and calling embrace the world’s needs,” says Nancy Baker, M.D., an assistant professor of family medicine and community health who is also a member of the church. In 2005, Baker approached the university’s Academic Health Center about getting involved in the project. The forum has become a collaboration between the church and the university, with the university providing financial support.
Such support has allowed the planning committee, on which Baker serves, to bring in a diverse group of speakers, including Emmy-award winning actor Charles Keating, who performed an original monologue on aging; Basil LeBlanc, M.D., the Minnesota Army National Guard’s state surgeon, who spoke about the medical and emotional needs of returning veterans; and local poet Susan Deborah King, who talked about the personal suffering associated with breast cancer, to name a few.
“We tell speakers that this is not just a place to talk about the work they do. We ask them to talk about the meaning of the work they do. We want learners to think about how this is shaping their professional lives,” Baker says.
Have the sessions affected the way people think and work? Baker, who collects evaluations at the end of each program, believes they do. For example, more than 90 percent of respondents said the talk about returning soldiers made them more mindful of veterans’ psychological and emotional needs; they also wrote about working in their communities to increase awareness of those needs and encouraging the government to continue funding “yellow ribbon” programs.
“I am amazed and humbled by the excitement I sense at the conclusion of each event,” she says. “Guests leave thanking us for having inspired them.”—Kim Kiser
Hungry for Humanities?
If you have an appetite for art, literature, or films related to medicine, you may want to check out the following resources. New York University School of Medicine developed and maintains the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, an annotated multimedia listing of prose, poetry, video, and art. Click on the title of a painting, poem, or movie, and you’ll find a brief description of the work, highlighting its connection to medicine. You can access the site at http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Main?action=aboutDB. Also, Kent State University Press has a Literature in Medicine book series. Recently published titles include a collection of plays called Dramas of Dis-Ease and a book of essays, Wider than the Sky: Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of Emily Dickinson. You can order the books online at http://upress.kent.edu/series/index.htm.
Forms of Healing
A fabricated wave of blue steel that resembles a tsunami, limestone rocks piled into a tall cairn, and polished wooden limbs that reach for the sky aren’t what you find in a typical healing garden. But in Bethesda Hospital’s Sheehy Therapeutic Garden, sculptures are as much a part of the landscape as raised flower beds and strategically placed seating areas.
The pieces described are among six that are on loan from the Franconia Sculpture Park, near Taylors Falls. A rotating collection has been on display at the garden—adjacent to the St. Paul rehabilitation hospital—since it opened in 2003.
The relationship with Franconia goes back to a chance meeting between Bethesda’s former CEO, Frank Indihar, M.D., and sculptor Fuller Cowles, one of the founders of the Franconia park, and his wife, ceramist Connee Mayeron Cowles. Indihar described his plan for a therapeutic garden at the hospital. “They became fascinated with my idea and how their sculptures would help us carry through the vision of a healing environment and an outdoor space that would be spiritually uplifting to patients,” Indihar says.
Neither Indihar nor Nancy Apfelbacher, one of the art directors for Bethesda, is aware of any other therapeutic garden in the United States that incorporates sculpture or other art forms. Both say the works get patients talking not only about the art but also about memories and feelings.
Says Indihar: “They really appeal to the artistic soul.”—Kim Kiser
Mozart's Magic
Listening to the slow movements from Mozart’s piano sonatas may improve healing after surgery, according to a recent Massachusetts General Hospital study.
A team led by a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who is also a serious pianist conducted a study involving 10 critically ill, postsurgical patients, half of whom spent time listening to selected movements from the Mozart sonatas. The investigators measured patients’ heart rate and blood pressure, electrical activity in the brain, serum levels of stress hormones and cytokines, requirements for sedatives, and level of sedation.
They found the five patients exposed to the music needed fewer drugs than the five control patients in order to achieve a comparable level of sedation. Perhaps more significant, the investigators noticed lower concentrations of the stress hormones interleukin-6 and epinephrine, which are associated with lower heart rate and blood pressure, and an increased concentration of pituitary growth hormone, which is conducive to healing, in the patients serenaded with the sonatas.
Results were published in the December 2007 issue of Critical Care Medicine.