Last week Dr. Carin Berkowitz spoke about the anatomy and its relation to art, two topics which rarely are addressed in the same talk. During the lecture she focused on Charles Bell\u2019s works which paired anatomy with art. Through his illustrations he was able to both capture the harsh scientific details of human anatomy while simultaneously bringing life and emotionality into the human body. These depictions of the human body are fascinating due the images that we currently associate with the study of anatomy and human bodies that are in your average textbook today.<\/p>\n
Dr. Berkowitz moved on to compare the works of Charles Bell to the work of Henry Gray in Gray\u2019s Anatomy. <\/em>There is a stark contrast between the ways in which these two artists depict the human body, the greatest difference being the emotionality and life that is conveyed in each. In comparison to Bell\u2019s scientifically accurate but emotionally charged images, Grays work is completely dehumanizing and is simply about the cold hard science without any attention to what makes a human: life and emotion. The texts that students currently use to study are much closer to the works of Gray and show little respect for the life of a human, suggesting that the bodies depicted in those books are specifically for scientific research and nothing else. This is a common theme that we see in a larger sense in schooling systems. There is much more emphasis on the study of the hard sciences than on more artistic disciplines and it is very important to strike a balance in order to receive a comprehensive education.<\/p>\n I think this is possibly one of the most important lessons that we have been exposed to during this talk series. We students are lucky to attend a college that encourages studying a variety of different disciplines and we have the flexibility to incorporate some of both the hard sciences and more artistic and creative disciplines. However, many students who attend more traditional one-track colleges do not have that opportunity and that can lead to a single way of thinking. In one of the previous lectures another professor spoke about the STEAM group at Yale University and how that group is helping others to understand climate change. STEAM as opposed to the more traditional STEM adds art along with the studies of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This is an example of how a multidisciplinary approach to understanding something can help to expand the ways in which we view a particular topic.<\/p>\n Regarding the question from an audience about ethics of how the bodies were obtained before people were able to donate them to science, I thought this was a horrifying example of how the study of the human body has become a field without emotion. In line with this, doctors and all medical staff are taught and encouraged to remove the emotion from what they do in order to adequately and professionally do their jobs. Is there any way to bring emotion back into medicine without creating more difficulty for the people who are treating the patients?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week Dr. Carin Berkowitz spoke about the anatomy and its relation to art, two topics which rarely are addressed in the same talk. During the lecture she focused on Charles Bell\u2019s works which paired anatomy with art. Through his illustrations he was able to both capture the harsh scientific details of human anatomy while … <\/p>\n