One Health is an approach and an outlook for understanding and addressing contemporary health challenges. A One Health approach recognizes that health challenges have multiple interrelated causes, and interrelated interventions. This episode of HealthConnections examines how the arts and humanities can help us understand health challenges, and forge interventions with a focus on sustainability and environmental, planetary, human and animal well-being. Dr. Carol Meyers, a professor emeritus in the University of Tennessee College of Nursing, talks with Dr. Amy Elias, a University of Tennessee Chancellor's professor, and distinguished professor of English, and the director of the UT Humanities Center.
WUOT’s Carole Meyer: Dr. Elias, how do you define the arts in humanities?
Amy Elias: Yeah, I think the easiest way to do that is simply by saying what the Humanities Center is. The Humanities Center is an institute at the University of Tennessee, whose mission is to advance research and funding for the arts and humanities in art, music, theater, but also English world languages, religious studies, classics, philosophy, and history. But we also branch out to other fields like law, architecture, data science, even anthropology. So we define the arts and humanities rather broadly at the University of Tennessee right now.
How can the humanities help us understand and improve health? How do we make that connection?
Well, the humanities have always invested in fields that research human flourishing and human well being. That's what we do. Supporting fields called narrative medicine and medical humanities are brand new fields and these open up new and exciting ways for the arts and humanities to add value to health care, education and healthcare practice.
I would love for you to give us an example of those two things.
The term ‘narrative medicine’ is centered around research about how we construct and interpret stories. So the field was started in 2001 by Dr. Rita Sharon, who was both an internist and a literary scholar. Narrative medicine involves writers, artists and scholars who work to enhance medical students' listening and observation skills. And they do this so that medical students can learn to see patients as people as more than just the sum of their medical histories. And the idea is that specialists in narrative studies can do their research to equip clinicians to comprehend and interpret their patients' stories so they can deliver equitable and effective health care. The term medical humanities is a little bit different as it has a different audience. It describes a diverse field of study that researches the social complexities of physical and mental health and how human health is intertwined with the natural environment and our cultural and political beliefs. Some examples might include studies of how society views disability, or addiction, or even poverty and racial difference, and the studies which show that our beliefs directly impact who gets health care, and what kind of health care they get. So last year, for example, the Humanities Center brought in Professor Robert Bullard, who is considered the father of environmental justice studies, and he discussed how people of color overwhelmingly are subject to lethal pollution and environmental health threats and he had a great quote, he said that ‘zipcode is still the most potent predictor of an individual's health and well being.’ So we have in the Department of Religious Studies professor Joe Witt, who researches how religion fostered resistance to that dangerously toxic practice of mountaintop removal mining. And Professor Hellene Syndrich in history and religious studies researches how Jewish people used public health strategies to combat deadly health conditions and not to get us during World War II. So there's a whole range of perspectives that might be included under medical humanities as well.
Wow, those are very interesting examples of how the humanities can inform our understanding of health and the delivery of healthcare and related services. How can the arts help us similarly?
The arts always participate in showing people the potentials and shortcomings of our social institutions, so I can give some examples of Arts here at UT in the English Department. For instance, Professor Stan Gardner offers an undergraduate course at MIT art humanities right now that examines how plays and novels and poems depict medical crises and health care concerns. I have taught comic books and graphic novels in an emerging field called graphic medicine, which is really cool and that communicates stories about illness and medical care. Last year, the Clarence Brown Theatre ran The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which is a play about a teenager on the autism spectrum. And in October, we're funding the UT College of Music to present a concert of a musical piece written by an 18th century composer who had surgery without anesthesia and who wrote this musical piece about that experience. So, arts of all kinds can force audiences to consider not only the privileges of able bodied people, but also the political consequences of healthcare systems historically and today.
I'd like to look now at your recent collaboration at the University of Tennessee through the Humanities Center, with the One Health Initiative. Could you tell us something about that, please?
Sure. So, the One Health and Humanities Initiative is a partnership between the Humanities Center and the UT System, One Health Initiative. What we're doing is we're partnering with the initiative to create a three day series of events showcasing the critical role that the arts and humanities play in understanding and exploring sustainability and global well being including human animal plant and environmental health. So we're running 10 events on campus over the course of three days. It is mostly all public advance. We hope all of your listeners can come.
Dr. Elias, do you have any parting words?
I think that maintaining human health depends not only upon the accurate diagnosis and treatment of disease, but also upon the human needs related to care, patient responses to treatment, social environments that affect human health. And these include patient-physician relationships. So the best health care is that which patients understand and actually practice and knowledge about human health care involves the spiritual, psychological, cultural, and ethical dimensions of human and inhuman life. So, the arts and humanities have always addressed these issues and concerns and we're eager and excited to forge new relationships with all of the health sciences.
This transcript has been lightly edited for content.
For information on upcoming One Health events, click here.
