Performing Medicine
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TESTIMONIALS
Performing Medicine is an outstanding example of art and higher education joining forces, with benefit to both sides… a superb achievement.
Sir Christopher Frayling
By opening up to the public the work they do with healthcare professionals, Clod Ensemble has broadened debate around the various cultural contexts in which doctors practice - or perform - medicine in the UK. It has allowed people to add their voices to the discussion and to engage with some of the many important social and ethical issues around modern healthcare.
Wellcome Trust
Performing Medicine engenders reflections and reactions to poetry and personae, professionalism and performance, paintings and pains. For the education of medical undergraduates today, there is no better preparation.
Professor Brian Hurwitz, D’Oyly Carte Chair of Medicine and the Arts, King’s College London
Performing Medicine has been a fantastic suite of activities to stimulate the mind and exercise the body of medical practitioners, students and patients. It is invaluable in provoking lateral thinking about the nature of medical care, the experience of patients and professionals, and the relationship between ethics, communication, science, and society. Through my involvement with Performing Medicine I have found new ways to talk about ethics and human rights in the healthcare context with students, colleagues and the public… This invaluable work should have everyone's support, and anyone would benefit from further exposure to it.
Professor Richard Ashcroft, Queen Mary,
University of London
The Performing Medicine arts in medicine project at Barts and The London has been a fantastic addition to our curriculum spanning a range of inputs and adding a dimension of learning that is evident when you take part yourself and also when you watch students’ responses. The activities are engaging the students not only with their thought processes but also with their emotions and in some instances with their physical bodies too.
Dr. Annie Cushing, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry
Peggy’s openness helped us all to talk about our feelings and opinions. Empathy may not be as innate as I had originally thought because through this workshop we significantly improved our bedside manners by exploring different prejudices and their lack of foundation. I believe we are now closer to becoming more tolerant and respectful doctors. Medical Student on Difference workshop led by Peggy Shaw
The myth of science and art being totally separated needs breaking … bringing ideas of medicine and performance together can make you aware of being alive (and others being alive) in different ways. It’s exciting!
Audience member, Performing Medicine Season 2008
Performing Medicine has been a wonderful exploration of how the arts can help young doctors understand their emotional life, human relationships and the impact of these on their role as future doctors. Some topics, for example, cultural and racial inequalities in health care, are challenging and riddled with uncertainty and anxiety. Death and dying are difficult topics for doctors in training to handled, not least as they usually are young and perhaps not experienced in grief and how to manage it nor how difficult it can be for survivors and the health care team. Again the arts offer a way of inspecting and investigating aspects of the human relationship that perhaps remain silent until the doctor is faced with a situation in real life. Much of how to manage oneself and self regulate and work with difficult clinical situations is taught by apprenticeship so the Arts can help young people connect with these issues early and so prepare for professional life. Psychiatry as a discipline is about people, what they think, enjoy, watch and cry about. Learning about people and how they live also allows reflection on how maturing doctors balance their work and home lives and manage the stresses of life. The Arts allow medical education to be relevant to society and of immediate relevance to the humanity with which doctors should practice. Apart from that, we know the Arts are helpful in health promotion, recovery and encouraging well being and resilience, no wonder we all like seeing films, going to the theatre, and being challenged by the unexpected. Art is life, and life is the subject doctors are least trained in, as opposed to illness on which they are well studied.
Professor Kamdaleep Bhui, Barts and The London
I had the pleasure of working with Clod Ensemble in the summer and Autumn of 2008 on a series of Performing medicine talks, workshops and performances for the public. All of the events that took place at the Wellcome Collection were popular to the point of over subscription and attracted a young, curious and diverse audience. The talks enabled audiences to engage in a genuine dialogue with world experts in medicine, the humanities and art and fostered connections between these different disciplines. The series was notable for the calibre of the participants and for the subjects selected for discussion which had broad public appeal and were important for medicine in society today. I am looking forward to future collaborations.
Lisa Jamieson, Events Manager, Wellcome Collection
It is not unusual for artists to work in and around medicine, bringing their practice into therapeutic use and enhancing the clinical environment with artworks and installations. However, the Clod Ensemble has pioneered a new and deeper way of working in which they have uncompromisingly brought their professional expertise and flair into the bedrock training of young doctors. The Gulbenkian Foundation supported the first pilot projects and we are delighted to see how the courses they developed with one university became so instructive that they were made an essential component, of basic training, and that furthermore, the idea has become more accepted amongst even with the more conservative trainers and teachers. Clinicians and medical researchers are used to developing ideas about human behavior through working with people who are ill or who possess some kind of dysfunction. The Clod performers, like the best actors and dancers, have superfunction and are able to demonstrate the extent of physical and mental feats of self-preservation that humans are capable of. They remind medical students that the body is not a machine, that the mind is embodied and that our emotions and material functions closely interact. They have undoubtedly helped young doctors gain greater self-awareness, greater understanding of their patients and greater self-possession. They have also demonstrated that the arts have their own highly developed strategies and techniques and have hopefully conveyed to their participants a more profound appreciation of theatre.
Sian Ede, Director of Arts, Gulbenkian Foundation
