Many of the center's aspirations were embodied in those events, which Marshall regards as its official launch. Aside from bringing together writer and physician, these human rights–focused events featured a performance by local jazz musicians and a photo exhibit by Need, a local magazine devoted to humanitarian efforts. It also crossed disciplines, with sponsorship by the Center for Creative Writing and the Harvard Street Forum, a joint venture of Grace University Lutheran Church, the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, the Academic Health Center, and the Center for Medical Humanities and the Arts.
The center's medical director, Jon Hallberg, M.D., believes the arts can deliver important messages about bioethics in a way that standard lectures can't.
Future collaboration, especially between the College of Liberal Arts and the Medical School, is high on Marshall's agenda. At the center's prompting, a multidisciplinary faculty group has begun exploring joint research and scholarly projects. The trend among grant-givers, including the National Institutes of Health, is to encourage such cross-fertilization. "The more multidisciplinary a proposal, the stronger it is," Marshall says.
Class offerings
The center's long-range plans include the creation of instructional courses, some of which might be jointly taught. Marshall, for example, would like to teach a course on the blues—music, that is—which she says evince many ailments physicians will encounter in clinical practice: depression, addiction, abuse, violence, dying, and grief. "It's all there in the music," she says. "It's a different way for students to understand."
At the same time, the center might offer a writing class or a course on producing audio documentaries like those aired on National Public Radio, says Hallberg, who favors an elective approach. "As passionate as I am about the humanities, I find it hard to force too much on anyone," he says, adding, "You can't create an empathetic student. But the center can create an atmosphere to nurture and foster humanistic impulses."
Students need that reinforcement, says Cuong Pham, a fourth-year medical student and cofounder of Harambee, a cultural arts celebration for medical students. "A lot of students love humanities and arts. They were in liberal arts before medical school and lost that along the way. It's important to keep them in touch with their own humanity."
But does it work?
Does a grounding in the arts make better doctors? Nobody knows. Marshall intends to conduct research to determine whether an interest in the arts and humanities has any effect on clinician performance. Whatever the findings, the center fills a big hole. "The center," says Pham, "is very important for medical students and an opportunity for our university to show that medicine is much more than drugs and procedures. It’s also about compassion and empathy."
As Hallberg puts it: "No matter how technologically based and oriented we become, no matter how focused on the molecular basis of disease, medicine will continue to be as much an art as a science. Our center will remind us of that. Thinking broadly, reading widely, being curious about the world and people who inhabit it, those are all essential to creating compassionate and caring physicians."
Surely, Williams, the physician-poet, would agree.