Performing Medicine: A Day of the Arts
By Jasmine Bager
 |
| Richard Kogan |
The worlds of medicine and the arts came together for a spring festival, hosted by The New York Academy of Medicine. The all-day event, “Performing Medicine,” explored the themes of interrelationships of medicine, health and the performing arts. Actors, dancers, doctors and musicians all took part at the Hosack Hall, art deco auditorium.
Performers included Dr. Richard Kogan with a musical performance and lecture on creative genius and psychiatric illness; Brian Lobel on his comedic adventures as a cancer patient; Parkinson’s coach and dancer Pamela Quinn on reading bodies; David Leventhal with DANCE FOR PD from Mark Morris Dance Group/Brooklyn Parkinson Group, and Mount Sinai’s Academy for Medicine and the Humanities on the art of listening. Dr. Danielle Ofri lead a panel and musicians from Weill Cornell’s Music and Medicine Initiative and provided musical interludes. Tours were available to the Coller Rare Book Reading Room and Gladys Brooks Book & Paper Conservation Laboratory.
The Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health’s mission is “to preserve and promote the heritage of medicine and public health, explore the connections between history, the humanities and contemporary medical, health policy and public health concerns, and make the history of medicine and public health accessible to public and scholarly audiences.”
The New York Academy of Medicine library was founded in 1847, and contains more than 550,000 volumes, including approximately 32,000 items in the rare book and historical collections. The Library is one of the largest medical collections in the US open to the general public, to whom it has been available since 1878.#
