Muse Meets Medicine : Festival of Arts and Human Dimension in Healthcare

Muse Meets Medicine

invites students, clinicians, artists, patients and educators to pause and explore what it means to be fully human in healthcare. Join us for a two-day celebration where art and medicine meet – not as opposites, but as partners in healing, learning and thriving.

Participants will have an opportunity to engage in creative practices and interdisciplinary dialogues that reveal vital connections between the humanities, medicine and the sciences. Through these art-based encounters, attendees will experience benefits that enhance clinical reasoning, empathy, communication, observation and critical thinking.

Through creative enquiry, conversation and collaboration, we open spaces for imagination, reflection, and connection – attending to the human dimension often squeezed by systems that prize speed and certainty. Participants will be able to select workshops to focus on wellbeing, enhancing clinical practice and/or enriching educational practice.

Together we ask:

• What nourishes our capacity to care?
• How might creativity help us see, treat, and heal differently?
• What does flourishing look and feel like?

Expect installations, performances, reflective workshops and shared moments of meaning-making that remind us that care is, at heart, a creative act. Join us as we co-create a flourishing space – relational, meaningful, compassionate and shadow-aware – where the muse meets medicine and new possibilities for humanising healthcare are generated.

Organising committee:

Dr Giampaolo Martinelli (Barts Hospital)

Prof. Louise Younie (Queen Mary University of London)

Dr Giskin Day (Imperial College London)

Prof. Christine Bentley (Missouri Southern State University)

Megan Tjasink (Barts Hospital & Queen Mary University of London)

Programme

Day 1: Monday 16 March, St Bartholomew Hospital (Barts), West Smithfield, London, EC1A 7BE

Throughout the Festival: works by Thomas D. Wright (Lungs Off and The Painted Patient), James Early and Rob Godman (Pulse and Anarchy in the Organism)

09.30 Registration (West Wing)

10.00 Welcome and musing conversations (William Palin and Giampaolo Martinelli)

10.30 Short presentations:

1. Art and Medicine (Joel Katz)
2. Sustaining Clinicians/Sustaining Care (Megan Tjasink)
3. Flourising Spaces (Louise Younie)
   
   

11.20 Panel discussion

11.40 Break

12.00 Workshops I (parallel sessions)

1. Create, Destroy, Transform (Megan Tjaskink and Christine Bentley): Robin Brook Centre, Room 6

Experience using arts-based methods to support emotional processing, reduce emotional exhaustion, and strengthen relational and reflective capacities.

1. Artopsy (Kate Jarman, Giampaolo Martinelli, Brooke DiGiovanni Evans, Elmira Bagherzadeh): Barts Health Archive

Draw inspiration from some of the intriguing images from the Barts Health Archive as a stimulus for imagining health histories.

1. Curious Bodies: From Specimen to Story (Joel Katz and Tori Rhodes): Barts Pathology Museum

Explore how careful observation can transform medical specimens into meaningful human narratives.

1. From Composition to Formulation: Poetry as Thinking Out Loud (Michael Stanley and Louise Younie): Robin Brook Centre, Bainbridge Room

Work with words and ambiguity to use creative enquiry as a platform for flourishing in the clinical encounter.

13.30 Lunch (£10 voucher for 21West cafe, 21 West Smithfield, London EC1A 9HY)

14.30 Guest lecture, Prof. Charles Night OBE (Chief Executive, St Bartholomew's Hospital), West Wing Conference Room

15.00 Workshops II (parallel sessions)

1. Create, Destroy, Transform (Megan Tjaskink and Christine Bentley): Robin Brook Centre, Room 6

Experience using arts-based methods to support emotional processing, reduce emotional exhaustion, and strengthen relational and reflective capacities.

1. Artopsy (Kate Jarman, Giampaolo Martinelli, Brooke DiGiovanni Evans, Elmira Bagherzadeh): Barts Health Archive

Draw inspiration from some of the intriguing images from the Barts Health Archive as a stimulus for imagining health histories.

1. Curious Bodies: From Specimen to Story (Joel Katz and Tori Rhodes): Barts Pathology Museum

Explore how careful observation can transform medical specimens into meaningful human narratives.

1. From Composition to Formulation: Poetry as Thinking Out Loud (Michael Stanley and Louise Younie): Robin Brook Centre, Bainbridge Room

Work with words and ambiguity to use creative enquiry as a platform for flourishing in the clinical encounter.

16.30 Break (Poetry Pharmacy available till 18.30, North Wing)

17.00 Rotating workshops, 30 minutes (North Wing):

1. Augmented Reality: Hidden Diagnoses (Elmira Bagherzadeh)
2. Visual Thinking Strategies discussion with Hogarth (Joel Katz & Brooke Di Giovanni)
3. Humuments (Giskin Day)
4. Where Hope Lives (Christine Bentley & Tori Rhodes)
5. Sounding Bodies (Joanne Harries, singer & Sophie Gledhill, Violoncello)

19.00 Dinner in the Great Hall (piano, Oliver Martinelli)

Day 2: Tuesday 17 March, Guildhall Art Gallery in the morning (Guildhall Yard, London EC2V 5AE), Barts in the afternoon/evening (West Smithfield, London, EC1A 7BE)

09.30 Registration

10.00 Workshops III (parallel)

1. Enhancing Observation, Communication and Teamwork through the Visual Arts (Joel Katz and Brooke DiGiovanni Evans)
2. Zines for the Human Dimension: Making Visible what Medicine Forgets (Louise Younie)
3. Shared Lines/Shifting Views (Christine Bentley, Tori Rhodes) (30 min) and Seeing in Motion: Perception and the Traumatrope (Elmira Bagherzadeh) (30 min)

11.15 Workshops IV (parallel)

1. Enhancing Observation, Communication and Teamwork through the Visual Arts (Joel Katz and Brooke DiGiovanni Evans)
2. Zines for the Human Dimension: Making Visible what Medicine Forgets (Louise Younie)
3. Shared Lines/Shifting Views (Christine Bentley, Tori Rhodes) (30 min) and Seeing in Motion: Perception and the Traumatrope (Elmira Bagherzadeh) (30 min)

12.30 Lunch (Transition to Barts Hospital and £10 voucher for 21West)

It is a 15 minute walk from Guildhall to Barts Hospital, or Bus 100 will take you to within 5 minutes walk from both venues

14.15 Developing Innovations in the Medical Humanities: ArtMedDx (AMDx) & Bagatelle (Christine Bentley with AMDx Team & Bernard de Bono)

15.10 Roots and Shoots of the Human Dimension: A Collective Reflection (Louise Younie and Megan Tjasink)

16.30 Final musings (Giampaolo Martinelli)

17.00 Event close

19.00 Concert in the Great Hall: Key Changes: Medicine, Music, and Transformation.

Performers include Mark Lee, Rob Godman, Elaine Cheew and actor Seb Harcombe

Link to Programme

https://sites.google.com/view/musemeetsmedicine/provisional-programme