Bringing the arts to health care is focus of lecture by acclaimed actress

The 12th annual Cam Busch Endowed Art for Health Lecture Series continues in March with an evening talk by award-winning actress and lecturer Megan Cole. 

Cole's address, Seeing Out of the Corner of the Eye: Bringing the Arts to Health Care, will focus on why the arts are important in health care.

Cole will also provide dramatic examples for each of the points made in her lecture in order to encourage "a mutually supportive juncture between medicine and the arts."

Highlighting the importance of art in the healing process is the purpose of the annual lecture series, which has hosted well-known artists, musicians, performing artists and academics from around the country.

"Each has brought his own unique message to help us better understand the role of arts in health care," Jennifer Nicely, foundation president for Memorial Health Care System, said in a press release.

According to the Foundation for Art and Healing, there are currently hundreds of professional organizations researching, documenting and systematizing how engaging patients with the creative processes can impact the development of disease and recovery from disease.

"There has been a similar focus within the arts community. Often based on their personal experience with illness, painters, dancers, sculptors, writers and arts educators have also realized the power of the creative process to heal body and mind. The ability to cope with an illness emotionally and spiritually has been demonstrated time and again to have significant impact on the results of treatment," according to the foundation's website.

Cole is best known for her portrayal of Dr. Vivian Bearing in the Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize winning-play "Wit." The play has been described as both funny and heart-wrenching, exploring the fate of a 50-year-old professor of English literature who has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was eventually made into a movie starring Emma Thompson.

At the request of the directors of the University of Texas /Houston Health Science Center, Cole developed curriculum in 2000 that proposed applying various skills from the profession of theater to the practice of medicine.

She also developed a 55-minute dramatized lecture version of the play titled "The Wisdom of 'Wit,'" in which Cole alternately interprets the play's perspectives on end-of-life issues while performing every character.

It has been presented at more than 40 teaching venues, including John Hopkins University School of Medicine, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic and Georgetown University Medical Center, among others. 

Tickets for the March 29 event are available here.