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Arts and culture
Religious paintings of the Renaissance, such as Donatello’s Chellini Madonna
(1456), offered patients the promise of an afterlife that was from suffering
UCLH NHS Foundation Trust/Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust
Catalan modernista architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner’s
flamboyantly ornamented Hospital de La Santa Creu i Sant
Pau (built from 1902) in Barcelona. The interwar link between
modernist architecture and preventive primary healthcare is
exemplified by Finsbury Health Centre (1938) designed by
Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton. Offering free medical care, it
was an early inspiration for the NHS, its two wings thrusting
out from a central axis as a “megaphone for health”.
The book title’s claim for the “healing presence” of art in
hospitals is not ambitious enough in the early 21st century.
Cork’s selection of masterpieces by great Renaissance
masters, including Piero della Francesca, Donatello, Rogier
van der Weyden and El Greco, illustrates how religious
belief historically offered patients the promise of relief
from earthly suffering and eventual heavenly peace, but
provides less insight into 21st-century patients’ experience
of art in association with contemporary western medicine.
Little evidence is presented or discussed about art’s role
in “healing” within hospitals, although data exist that views
John Loughborough
Pearson’s Middlesex
Hospital Chapel (1890),
now Grade II-listed
of nature, illusory or real, reduce patients’ use of post-operative pain relief and the
durations of their hospital stays. The role of art therapy – practical art in the hands of
patients rather than on hospital corridor walls – is also hugely important. For example,
Jeffrey Blondes’ video installation in a windowless Intensive Care Unit at Guy’s and St
Thomas’ Hospital and an art session organised by the National Portrait Gallery at Great
Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, up the ante for art’s healing role in hospitals.
Cork’s prodigiously researched book documents how art in hospitals developed and
provides a solid foundation for its future role.
Colin Martin is a writer on architecture, art and design, with a particular interest in
their intersection with medicine and science
Richard Dadd in around 1856; in poor mental
health, the artist spent 42 years incarcerated in
Bethlem Hospital and Broadmoor Asylum
78 January 2012 | WORLD HEALTH DESIGN www.worldhealthdesign.com