What is common to Jabbar Patel, Shreeram Lagoo and Mo-
han Agashe?
They are all doctors who have had successful innings in cine-
ma or theatre. You could add dancers, musicians, painters to
this list. Are they outliers or is there a role of arts in medicine?
Leonardo da Vinci was an obvious outlier. Did the medical
profession lose them to the arts?
I
Dr. Anand Krishnan
Professor, CCM
f you ask the greats mentioned
above, I am sure they will reply
that the background in medicine
brought a unique perspective to arts and
also that their experience in arts enriched
their medical practice. While medicine
is defined as the art and science of heal-
ing; science has largely overridden the art
part of its practice. In India, entrance to
medical schools is entirely based on tests
which in turn are based on rote and a lit-
tle bit of logical/critical thinking – areas
denoted by the left side of the brain. The
right side of the brain is concerned with
the fine arts including imagery, poetry, and
drawing. These have been seen largely as
exclusive entities. Our medical curricu-
lum requires hours of drudgery in trying
to remember facts and figures. Almost no
medical school in India lays any emphasis
on art in the medical curriculum. As one
said, “medical school attracts those that
are left brain dominant, but then proceeds
to atrophy what is left of their right brain”.
Unlike physics or chemistry, medicine
is not a pure science. Medicine is largely
an applied science and it requires certain
skills that are developed through observa-
tion, practice, and experience – something
that is similar to arts and not science. One
can say, that medicine is a science when
it is used to study disease but becomes
an art when it is used to practice healing.
While medicine has a long and a distin-
guished history of caring and comforting,
the scientific basis of medicine is rec