The Arts as Medicine? New Histories of the Arts and Health

如今，人们对利用艺术来改善健康的兴趣与日俱增，无论是通过被称为艺术疗法的精神病学分支，还是通过以社区为基础的实践，如社会处方。然而，艺术和健康之间相互联系的历史仍然鲜为人知。到目前为止，看起来要么是欧洲和北美以外的，要么是18世纪以前的作品很少。此外，绝大多数关于艺术和健康的学术往往集中在单一的媒介或学科上，很少有学者之间的交流单独关注音乐、文学、视觉艺术和舞蹈等实践。此外，学术和实践方面的最新发展对支撑现有少数几部历史的现代欧洲焦点的假设提出了质疑。一方面，科学和医学历史学家越来越多地意识到，早期现代时期的欧洲人认为绘画、文学文本和音乐等现象对心理和身体都有物理影响。通过这样做，他们表明，前现代的欧洲人将艺术理解为治愈疾病的工具，他们并没有像19世纪和20世纪的常态那样，对心理健康和身体健康进行严格的区分。同样，研究前现代中国和波斯的学者们也表明，和谐等概念支撑着艺术和音乐等媒体的治疗用途。这样的历史再一次质疑了现代欧洲人对审美经验、医学和身心区分的分类。此外，神经科学最近的研究支持其中一些前现代的观点，许多科学家研究涉及身体和精神的审美体验。因此，作为医学的艺术项目将寻找新的地理位置、分期和方法，以研究艺术史、美学和健康之间的联系。通过一系列的三个研讨会和两个公共活动，它将使学者、从业者和公众能够分享迄今为止在艺术和卫生史上黯然失色的全球和早期现代观点。特别是，它将寻求通过促进音乐、文学、视觉艺术、舞蹈和神经科学专家之间的互动来克服学科割裂带来的困难--这些专家可以从更多地了解彼此的专业知识中获益良多。此外，该项目还涉及到艺术治疗、心灵哲学和神经科学方面的持续变革。特别是，我们将努力培养人文科学学者的意识：1.神经科学研究，考察整个身体在我们认知过程中的作用，以及环境对心身工作的影响；2.日益强调将健康和福祉与更广泛的社会现象相结合的整体方法的医疗实践。这些发展挑战了19世纪和20世纪的艺术疗法的精神病学愿景，这种愿景一直是大多数学者关注的对象，鼓励我们在目前的艺术和健康方法与过去它们的前身之间寻找新的交叉点。因此，该项目将使广泛的人文学者受益，包括健康和医学历史学家、艺术历史学家、文学学者和音乐学家。此外，该项目将促进这些学者和神经科学家以及艺术和健康的理论家和实践者之间的跨学科接触。更重要的是，该项目将利用斯托里(兰开斯特)和爱丁堡皇家医师学院的公共活动来促进公众对艺术和健康的认识。

Today, there is growing interest in using the arts to improve health, whether through the branch of psychiatry known as art therapy, or through community-based practices such as social prescribing. However, the history of the interconnections between the arts and health remains poorly understood. So far, little work has been done that looks either outside Europe and North America, or earlier than the 18th century. Moreover, the vast majority of scholarship on the arts and health tends to focus on a single medium or discipline, with little exchange between scholars focusing separately on practices such as music, literature, the visual arts, and dance. In addition, recent developments in both scholarship and practice call into question the assumptions underpinning the modern European focus of the few histories currently available. On the one hand, historians of science and medicine have grown increasingly aware that Europeans of the early modern period saw phenomena such as paintings, literary texts, and music, as having physical effects on both mind and body. In so doing, they suggest that pre-modern Europeans understood the arts as tools for healing, and that they did not distinguish as sharply between psychological and bodily health as became the norm in the 19th and 20th centuries. Similarly, scholars working on pre-modern China and Persia have shown that concepts such as harmony underpinned therapeutic uses of media such as art and music. Once again, such histories call into question modern European categorizations of aesthetic experience, medicine, and the mind-body distinction. Moreover, recent research in neuroscience supports some of these pre-modern ideas, with many scientists studying aesthetic experiences involving the body as well as the mind. The Arts as Medicine project will thus seek out new geographies, periodizations, and methods for studying the links between the histories of art, aesthetics, and health. Through a series of three workshops and two public events, it will enable scholars, practitioners, and the public to share global and early modern perspectives that have so far been overshadowed in the history of the arts and health. In particular, it will seek to overcome the difficulties imposed by disciplinary fragmentation by facilitating interactions between specialists in music, literature, the visual arts, dance, and the neurosciences - specialists who have much to gain from a greater awareness of each other's expertise. Furthermore, the project engages with ongoing transformations in art therapy, philosophy of mind, and neuroscience. In particular, we will seek to foster awareness among humanities scholars of: 1. neuroscience research examining the role of the whole body in our cognitive processes as well as the impact of the environment on the workings of that mind-body; 2. healthcare practices that increasingly emphasize holistic approaches that integrate health and wellbeing with broader social phenomena. Such developments challenge the 19th- and 20th-century vision psychiatric vision of art therapy that has been the object of most scholarly attention, encouraging us to seek out new intersections between present approaches to the arts and health and their antecedents in the past. The project will therefore benefit a wide range of humanities scholars, including historians of health and medicine, historians of art, literary scholars, and musicologists. Moreover, the project will foster interdisciplinary engagement between those scholars and neuroscientists, as well as theorists and practitioners of the arts and health. What is more, the project will use public events at The Storey (Lancaster) and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh to promote public awareness of the arts and health.