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Research Paper | Humanities | India | Volume 11 Issue 5, May 2022 | Rating: 4.8 / 10

Medicalization of Arts and Humanization of Medicine: The Interdisciplinarity in Oliver Sacks' The Case of the Colour-Blind Painter

Leenu Lenus | H. Kalpana Rao

Abstract: Several movements have emerged since the field's inception in the 1970s, challenging the fundamental ideas, assertions, and practices of what became known as the medical humanities. Physicians and humanities scholars founded Health Humanities as an academic discipline in the early 1970s to integrate humanities into medical education. The objective knowledge of medical science was merged with the humanistic and subjective understanding of the arts. This multidisciplinary strength has contributed to the field's diversity and spurred creative epistemological innovation. This interdependence of medicine and arts is explored in Oliver Sacks' The Case of the Colour-Blind Painter, in which the doctor, Sacks, chronicles the journey of Mr Jonathan I., a colour-blind painter. This research aims to demonstrate how humanities and medicine as disciplines interact and help one another. This approach will allow us to examine our beliefs and assumptions about illness and patients and demonstrates how one's identity can be positively reinvented while battling a disease, sickness, or disorder.

Keywords: Health humanities, medicine, arts, illness narratives, narrative medicine

Edition: Volume 11 Issue 5, May 2022,

Pages: 1756 - 1759