Fort Worth Medical School Professor Shows How Medicine Can Shift to Art

FORT WORTH – Why does the medical field lend itself so well to performance art that intends to repulse its audience?

TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine faculty member Lauren Mitchell, Ph.D., demonstrated how quickly medicine can shift from medicine to art during her Claudia V. Camp Faculty Research Award lecture entitled “Alienating Aesthetics: Performance Art and the Medical Imagination” based on her academic book project.

The lecture, organized by the Women & Gender Studies Program, highlighted Dr. Mitchell’s award-winning project. “The WGST program is doing some awesome things for TCU both in terms of opportunities for service learning and volunteering with various organizations in the Fort Worth area, as well as in terms of their academic investments,” Dr. Mitchell said.  “I’m thrilled that the School of Interdisciplinary Studies exists at TCU to help foster such unique learning opportunities for faculty and students.  I am especially grateful to WGST for allowing such an innovative, collaborative forum and intellectual community.”

Dr. Mitchell said her lecture considered the relationship between medicine, museums, and performance art, looking  “at the purpose of art that uses surgery as a bizarre aesthetic strategy in order to consider the question of why an artist would want to alienate a spectator, what’s the value of an artistic work that’s invested in repelling its audience and why would medicine, a caregiving field meant to heal the human body be associated with horror and alienation and aesthetics from the 19^th century to now? ”

Dr. Mitchell, who helped develop the medical school’s Compassionate Practice® curriculum, began her research by delving into the oversimplification of the definition of empathy. Empathy is often defined as the ability to feel the feeling of others, however, this is leading to the opposite effect in medicine, she said.

“Our definition of empathy often looks a little narcissistic and a little too contingent on the sense of relatability,” Dr. Mitchell said. “In other words, if you work in any caregiving field, you’re going to come in contact with a multitude of people with whom you can’t easily identify, so what then? And how do you build that bridge?”

Dr. Mitchell said this project is closely tied to her clinical experience with the doula project and managing the reproductive family planning clinic at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.  “Much of this work, while I was there was just to be with my patients in capacities of emotional, physical and informational support as they entered operating room spaces”

Dr. Mitchell’s unique clinical and academic background lends itself to the project as she  expounded on historical context for the western medicinal practices of the 18^th and 19^th century and demonstrated the connective tissue medical museums have with performance art.  Dr. Mitchell discussed how the anatomical Venus, which was a dissectible wax figure of a woman presented sensually to male medical students in the 19^th century, correlated with the feminist works of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and contemporary artist ORLAN.

Ultimately Dr. Mitchell argues that the goal of performance artists is to use such examples of alienating imagery and force the audience to “acknowledge the limitations of her imagination, while also demanding that she not look away.  From this the hope of a more “useful definition of empathy” can come about allowing those in medicine can broaden the scope of empathy.

Dr. Mitchell will lead a Grand Rounds on Tuesday, May 4 with medical school faculty member Chase Crossno, MPH, who helped develop the medical school’s Compassionate Practice® curriculum.   “This may help our SOM colleagues see how our interdisciplinary and unique sounding curriculum maps onto a practical, medical-student toolkit,” Dr. Mitchell said. “This lecture will also touch on our scholarship that combines the theatre pedagogy that is the backbone of The Compassionate Practice® with close reading.”

She was honored to be the Claudia V. Camp Faculty Research Award winner:  “The award was a reminder that the project still has a place in scholarly dialogue, and I am thrilled to have the support as I revise the draft of Alienating Aesthetics for publication.”

Dr. Mitchell intends to spend the 2021-2022 academic year developing and submitting the manuscript of the book project for publication.

You can view the lecture here.  https://tcu.zoom.us/rec/share/bu4d48Wym9v21PluHS6l-TnLKbcJOZloZPSjjVf37IODEJoV8FA78pGOYyOYGwAo.CxmQdawj54QXk6Mh

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