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Week Four: Art and Medicine


Medicine and art are generally never thought of together. These are the competing fields with very different ideas about them. However, there are many connections between medicine and art and many of these connections are very important to the success and importance of medicine. 

Personally for me, the first thing that I thought about when I saw that this week’s topic was plastic surgery. This seems like something that embodies both art and medicine to a very high degree. In her third lecture on medical technologies and art, Professor Vesna argues that plastic surgery can be seen as art in two different senses. First with the doctor being an artist to change someone’s looks. She also makes to point that the patient can be the artist as they can use the surgery to comment on culture’s notions about beauty. She uses the example of Orlan. She is a French performer who has had 9 cosmetic surgeries all directed as a live performance. She even has her body being transformed to look like other forms of art such as Mona Lisa, Europa, or Venus. This example embodies many ways that medicine and art are connected. 

One of the many reasons that art is so connected to medicine is because of the fascination of artists, and more broadly human beings, with the anatomy of ourselves.  In her first lecture on medical technologies Professor Vesna talks about the very famous and popular exhibit called Body Worlds. This is a way that people have displayed real human muscles, tissues, skin, bones, and all other parts of the human body for people to come look at just like it is art. Art can also be used to show medicine. Virgil Wong uses “the evolving states of human health” through his art which includes paintings, drawings, and prints. He can show symptoms and pain through his art and can help people understand medicine better though this (Wong).
Another connection between art and medicine is the way in which it can influence a culture and the way that people think. Eve Andree Laramee looks to see how art and science can both construct belief systems by focusing on the “overlap and interconnection between artistic exploration and scientific investigation, and to the slippery human subjectivity underlying both processes” (Laramee). 

With my personal experience in medical situations, I often find myself confused and overwhelmed with how things work or even understanding what needs to be done in any given circumstance. I have had an MRI performed on me before, however I didn't know much about how it worked. Even reading about it in “Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as Mirror and Portrait: MRI Configurations between Science and the Arts” by Silvia Casini didn't help me understand it in a way that would ever be useful to me. So for me, this intersection and combination of art and medical technologies allows be to better understand my own personal anatomy and experiences that I would otherwise not know. 


References
Casini, S. (2011). Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as Mirror and Portrait: MRI Configurations between Science and the Arts. Configurations, 19(1), 73-99.

Laramee, E. A. Earthlink~Wander. Retrieved April 28, 2019, from http://home.earthlink.net/~wander/

Vesna, V. (2019). Medical Technologies: Part One. [Video Lecture]. Retrieved from
https://cole2.uconline.edu/courses/1067208/pages/unit-3-view?module_item_id=26086628. 

Vesna, V. (2019). Medical Technologies: Part Three. [Video Lecture]. Retrieved from https://cole2.uconline.edu/courses/1067208/pages/unit-3-view?module_item_id=26086628. 

Wong, V. Art. Retrieved April 28, 2019, from http://virgilwong.com/art/

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