Blast to the Past: How the Arts Have Been Embedded in Medicine for Centuries

As a Pre-Med student studying the Arts and the Sciences, there is a tremendous amount of crossover that has led to a strong foundation of the Arts embedded in Medicine. I didn’t come to this epiphany just by glancing at a singular piece of work, rather it was an accumulation of patterns that emerged the more I studied the Arts. 

The initial moment I began to notice this pattern was in my Italian Renaissance class where we began studying the journal entries from Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo began dissections after he moved to Milan, which developed into performing dissections in the hospitals of the Italian City States. It is presumed that his interest was sparked during his apprenticeship in the workshop of Verrochio. His early anatomical studies primarily dealt with the skeletal and muscular structures. While much of his work went unpublished, scientists recognized that his anatomical work was centuries beyond its time. Another crucial element in the anatomical drawings of Leonardo was that he was fairly accurate.

However, Leonardo’s works were not the initial moment in which Medicine and the Arts began working cohesively. It was in Hellenistic time periods where the hub for medical research emerged. Early thinkers like Hippocrates and Galen were noted as some of the most important historians documenting and drawing the human body. And Hippocrates is obviously important in the field of medicine, specifically the Hippocratic oath that new Doctors declare as they begin their new occupation. 

As times continued to progress, Medical drawings were still incorporated into artistic findings of many critical thinkers integral to the scope of medicine. With this progression, there also was an emergence of medical information that was not so overtly obvious to the untrained eye. While the anatomical drawings were informing the inner findings of the human body, diagnosis of possible ailments were considered in the works of famous artists. Specifically Edgar Degas’s works show tremendous deterioration and imprecision in his brush strokes when comparing his early work to his later work. This was possibly due to the worsening of his central vision, which was brought to light through the observations of an ophthalmologist. This demonstration goes to show that Art doesn’t just aid the genesis of medical discovery, rather it also aids the deduction of reasoning and rationalization in effective medical diagnosis. 

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