In this lecture, Dr. Susan Holman considers the question, “What might religious history offer our world today in essential, positive models and tools to improve medicine, public health, and healthcare efforts?”

Ancient writers called medicine one of the highest arts because it aimed at whole-person wellness, body and soul. The best healers should base care, said Galen, on “the logical, the physical, the ethical,” that is, he meant, on philosophical virtues and observation-based evidence that understood healing as a public good, practiced with equity rather than for personal gain. In the Christian traditions of late antiquity, such virtuous healers included professional physicians as well as women and men attentive to architecture, painting, poetry, scripture, music, and liturgy, insofar as these nurtured environmental and incarnational wholeness.

An arts-based approach to health care may seem irrelevant to the modern STEM focus on high-tech, cost-contained biomedicine and sometimes-fragmented clinical care. Yet in fact, Dr. Holman will argue, practices that can sustain community health and embodied human flourishing are possible only when healers are also grounded in thoughtful, informed, constructive, and creative understandings of religious history as a healing art.

Questions? Please contact Dr. Agnes Choi choiaa@plu.edu