Pulse
The Year of Living Creatively
Colloquium honors six medical students who have pursued artistic endeavors.
Standing beside a grand piano in a gallery in the Weisman Art Museum, fourth-year medical student Paul Schaefer takes a deep a breath, opens his mouth, and begins to sing an aria from Le Roi d’Ys, an opera by French composer Edouard Lalo. The crowd becomes silent as Schaefer’s tenor floats through the high-ceilinged room. Thus begins the second annual Fisch Art of Medicine Colloquium.
The colloquium, which took place in March, honored six medical students who had received an award given by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Arts and Medicine in the name of retired pediatrician Robert Fisch, M.D. Each year the awards, which range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, are given to students to use for travel, classes, or supplies and equipment.
Fisch, who studied art for more than 10 years after finishing his residency, had long wanted to do something to encourage medical students to pursue the arts. He believes that involvement in the arts not only enriches doctors’ lives, it also helps them better relate to patients. “Medicine is not simply scientific knowledge,” he says. “It’s how we communicate, how we tell what we know.” He thinks creating or performing art provides a way for understanding the world that is different from what doctors experience as scientists and feels it is essential that physicians extend themselves beyond medicine. “We cannot close ourselves in a dark hole. We have to elevate ourselves, become a broader person.”
As the most recent group of students receiving Art of Medicine awards described their forays into music, pottery, drawing, clowning, and poetry at the colloquium, it was clear each had done just that. Here are the stories of three of the student-artists.
Not Just Clowning Around
For third-year medical student Andrea Noel, receiving the Art of Medicine award was an opportunity to revisit an old love. Noel had been acting and performing since she was 4 years old. From age 14 on, when a friend introduced her to juggling, she had been learning circus skills, which she parlayed into jobs at company picnics, weddings, and parties.
While studying abroad as an undergraduate, Noel joined a group of street performers in Aberdeen, Scotland, who did fire dancing, stilt walking, and juggling, further expanding her repertoire. After college, she joined a company called Incendiary Circus, a group of performers who worked with the added challenge of fire. “From bicycles to jump ropes to hula hoops,” she says, “we pretty much lit everything on fire.” Noel loved it.
But Noel also loved medicine. She had grown up in a family of physicians—“Medicine was a common dinner table topic for my family”—and she fully intended to go to medical school. Deciding to juggle her passions, she applied to circus school about the same time she applied to medical school. She was accepted first to a circus school in Christchurch, New Zealand; two weeks later, she was accepted into the University of Minnesota Medical School. “I told my circus school I was going to drop out and be a doctor,” she says.
But when she got to Minnesota, she realized the circus performer in her was still very much alive. Thus, when she learned about the Fisch award, she saw an opportunity to combine her loves. Noel proposed taking courses in stand-up and improvisational comedy and attending a clown camp.
Noel sees similarities between clowning and medicine. “As doctors, we get to connect with the core of people when they are in need,” she says. “A good clown also connects with something basic—joy or sorrow—in an audience.” She believes humor is healing. “It’s hard to feel terrible when you’re laughing,” she says.
This fall, Noel will take a break from medical school and, with her own funding, head to the Escola de Clown in Barcelona, Spain, for two months to continue her studies. Despite her investment of money, time, and effort in circus arts, she’s not quite sure how she’ll ultimately blend her passion for performing with medicine. She might someday follow the path of physician and clown Patch Adams. This summer, she’ll try to tag along with Jon Hallberg, M.D., if he gets called to treat Cirque du Soleil performers when they come to town. “We will see how it pans out,” she says. “Hopefully, if I keep doing things that make me happy, I’ll end up doing something I love.”
Back to the Drawing Board
When she graduated from Mounds View High School in Arden Hills, Katie Pastorius might have been voted the girl most likely to be an artist. She had taken every art class she could and by her senior year was the art teacher’s assistant. Pastorius, however, knew she wanted to become a physician. She abandoned formal art classes during her undergraduate years at Boston and Macalester colleges, but she didn’t stop drawing.
When she started medical school, however, she gave that up, too. “I had kind of lost that part of me,” she says, so she decided to apply for a Fisch award, proposing to take courses through the university’s Split Rock Arts Program. She ended up taking a weeklong class in which she spent eight hours a day drawing live models with pastels. She also took a writing class.
“It definitely got me back into my art, which I had completely neglected the first three years of med school,” Pastorius says of receiving the grant. In addition to making art, she has begun to seek it out more. She’s gone to local art shows and crawls, and talked with other artists, enjoying the fact that she can speak knowledgeably about producing art. “I can have an intellectual conversation in more than just the medical field,” she says.
She especially enjoys drawing people and capturing their emotions, but she’s still trying to find her style. “I’ve put drawing off for too long,” she says, “and I haven’t done enough to really know what is me.”
Pastorius believes it’s important for medical students to balance school and other interests. “If you don’t find it now,” she warns, “it’s going to become harder and harder as you get further along in your training. … You really have to prioritize that just like you prioritize studying for an exam.” Her ability to do that will be tested again this month when she leaves to spend a year in Peru researching cardiovascular disease as a recipient of a Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholars and Fellow award. She plans to bring her sketchbook, camera, and journal.
Voice Lessons
Having sung professionally as a section leader in the Minnesota Chorale and as a chorus member in Minnesota Opera productions, and having conducted choirs in churches and at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, Paul Schaefer was no singing slouch. But when he first thought about applying for a Fisch award, he hesitated. “I was a little intimidated,” he says. He had seen the high-level work of the first Art of Medicine award recipients—photographer Justin Finch and Brian Muthyala, who produced a radio documentary. “I was so amazed with the projects. I thought they were so great.”
Throughout his first two years of medical school, Schaefer had longed to be involved in music again, and he was eventually persuaded to apply for an award, hoping to jumpstart his neglected singing career. He proposed studying voice with university faculty member John de Hahn with the idea that he’d perform a recital at the end of the year.
Schaefer discovered a recital was too ambitious to tackle while completing his fourth year of medical school. But he says he’s satisfied with what he’s accomplished. “I look at where I’m at now, and feel I’ve grown substantially in the last 12 months of lessons,” he says. “At 39, I’m singing better than I was at age 29.”
For Schaefer, art and medicine are inextricably linked. In fact, a health problem related to his singing was what led him to medical school and his decision to specialize in performing arts medicine. Plagued by laryngitis, he was diagnosed with laryngopharyngeal reflux only after he went to specialists who understood the voice. He learned that acid reflux likely was triggered by his singing technique. When he was accurately diagnosed and treated, he recovered. “It was transformative,” he says of finally being treated by those who understood how his health was affecting his art.
As a result, Schaefer believes doctors who treat performing artists need to be involved in the arts themselves. “There’s no substitute for firsthand knowledge of what it takes to maintain your technique and your skill set at a certain level,” he says, explaining that only another singer understands the effects on the voice of improper technique, environmental contaminants, and the changes that come with age. He plans to look for performing opportunities as he begins his family medicine residency.
Despite his achievements—a master’s degree in music and now a medical degree—Schaefer doesn’t think he’s all that unusual. “There are other classmates who are involved in the arts at an even higher level,” he says. “I don’t have any exceptional gifts. I just had an exceptional opportunity.”—Carmen Peota