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ART AND
MEDICINE

Using Art to Heal
Physician Burnout

By Ruth Berggren, MD, MACP

From the beginning of time, human expression through music, Healer’s Touch is a statue by artisan carvers of the Shona Tribe in Zimbabwe. A
literature and visual art forms has provided respite from the harsh much smaller version of this artwork was adopted by the Daisy Foundation in 1999
realities of life. As healers, we’d do well to remember the words of as Daisy Awards for Extraordinary Nurses to honor the superhuman work nurses do
our fellow physician Albert Schweitzer, the Nobel Peace Laureate, for patients and their families every day. University Hospital is a participating hospital
musician-theologian, who noted: “Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, in the program. Photo of statue by Mark Greenberg.
laughter — to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we
are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and Connective Tissue features many examples of visual arts, and over
see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and time, a uniquely UT Health San Antonio genre has emerged from
contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fath- work by two of our recent graduates. You have been reading the
omless water.” genre on the pages of this magazine in recent months. Chris Yan
and Sara Noble concocted “Project 6-55,” a writing workshop cus-
Despite magnificent advances in the technology of medical sci- tomized for busy clinicians who frequently believe that they are too
ence, we’ve found neither pills nor procedures to soothe the souls of busy or untalented for reflective writing. The workshop facilitates
the suffering as powerfully as music, poetry, literature and the visual reflection on the meaning of our work as healers by pairing two pre-
arts. As statistics on physician burnout accrue, with controversies viously described “flash-fiction” genres: the six word story (said to
swirling about the shrinking pies of physician time and health care have originated with Ernest Hemingway during a bar-room wager),
resources, it is still the case that the arts and medical humanities can and the 55-word story (origins obscure but appearing in medical lit-
transport us “from the world of unrest to a world of peace.” erature by the turn of this century). After a brief introduction, par-
ticipants are given paper, pencil and a prompt, such as “think about
Students and faculty at the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics a moment during your work week, when you were in the presence
at UT Health San Antonio believe that by studying, creating, sharing of a patient and you experienced …moral distress.” The workshop
and surrounding ourselves with art forms (all of which are narrative leader may substitute other words evocative of emotion, doubt, strife
storytelling in some way), we find not just those much-sought mo-
ments of transcendence: we become better healers, find community
through shared values, and answers to professional burnout.

In 2008, during my first year as center director, a medical student
proposed to start a literary and arts journal by and for her peers. She
proposed the journal’s title be Connective Tissue: a metaphor de-
scribing how the expression of our humanity can bind us together
as a community, analogous to the manner in which connective tissue
binds organs together into one body. Approaching Connective Tis-
sue’s 10th anniversary, I am struck by its sustained growth and di-
versity: Our current issue brought submissions from nursing, dental,
medical and PA students as well as from faculty, staff and even pa-
tients. There is no shortage of talent in our ranks. From photogra-
phers to poets, painters and writers of prose, everyone has a story to
tell, and everyone has a need to tell their story. Connective Tissue
entries illustrate not only the pathos of human suffering from dis-
ease, discrimination and injustice, but also the beauty to be discov-
ered in quiet contemplation, the hard-won joys of transformation
as learners discover their professional identities.

32 San Antonio Medicine • July 2017