Symposium uses the arts to teach about illness

Ask any cut-and-thrust surgeon about a hard day’s work and he or she is likely to say something like: “It was bedlam today.

I had two aneurysms, a liver transplant, not to mention that old guy’s shattered humerus.”

The let-me-at-’em and let me home brigade won’t even know the patient’s name. They could do worse than attend a symposium next weekend at University College Cork. They might learn something from The Experience of Illness: Learning from the Arts, hosted by the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre at UCC.

Great achievements in medicine have enhanced our treatment of many diseases, but understanding what it feels like to be sick requires more than technological advances and medical science. The facts of disease are objective and readily available, whereas the concept of illness is subjective, less accessible and often neglected.

If you are not convinced, ask RTÉ’s Morning Ireland broadcaster, Áine Lawlor, a cancer survivor who opens the symposium next Friday and brings her personal experience to the understanding of the human experience of illness.

“This symposium is both timely and timeless,” says Fergus Shanahan, professor of medicine at UCC and director of APC. “Whereas disease is black and white, illness — the experience of disease — is coloured, nuanced by a multitude of variables including personal, social, historic and cultural factors.

“While science can teach us much about disease, only the arts and humanities can offer us an understanding of what it feels like to be ill. This symposium will offer an overview of illness as expressed, not only in the visual arts, but also in music, fiction, film, poetry, dialogue and narrative.”

The symposium will feature high-profile national and international speakers. One of the keynote lectures, The Consequences of Disclosure of Mental Illness, will be given by American Dr Kay Jamison, head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. She has written numerous scientific articles about bipolar disorders and has appeared on popular television programmes such as The Oprah Winfrey Show and Larry King Live.

The Experience of Illness symposium will be complemented by an art exhibition at the Glucksman Gallery at UCC and will feature pieces from renowned international artists. Visitors will be invited to view different perspectives on the experience of illness, from the candid self-portraits of Jo Spence during her cancer treatment to the tongue-in-cheek pharmaceutical graphics as imagined by Damien Hirst.