Science Summit at United Nations General Assembly (UNGA78)

Learning medicine and health through art is one of the attractive active learning and teaching methodologies that plays a key role in engaging students, motivating them, and awakening their senses.
Thus, it is intended to create new approaches to medical education through other learning resources, such as plastic arts, music, and literature, to sharpen curiosity and stimulate empathy reflection and sustain the commitment of students to acquiring knowledge.

In this session, Prof. Ana Paula Girol will highlight many representations of diseases and pathological conditions in the field of plastic arts, such as tuberculosis, abortion, blindness, and the plague, among others. It is also intended to point out to medical students that the doctor-patient relationship can be demonstrated through various positive and negative models of experiences with the disease.

In addition, the perception of literature, especially of the classics, as an important source and activity for understanding human subjectivity and the human condition is not recent and was even the subject of enthusiastic comments by Sigmund Freud in the past regarding the nature of the psychic and its normal and pathological manifestations. In this view Teaching in Health Sciences and (Classical) Literature: Literary Texts as a Privileged Source for Understanding Human Subjectivity and Current Mental Health Problems will be presented by Prof. Franco Cossu Jr. Although the necessary ultra-specialisation and the technical improvement of academic knowledge in Medicine and in the area of Health Sciences, in general, have abbreviated or even diminished the importance of teaching the humanities, literature and its great works seem to offer, in a direct and privileged way, an important hermeneutical shortcut for a more comprehensive understanding of human actions – and not only in the clinical-practical sense but, above all, in understanding the more general relations of subjectivity and its social-historical surroundings.

This justifies the importance of literary references as an additional resource for academic teaching in the field of Medicine and for the analysis of contemporary mental health problems and body ailments.

Moreover, between the art creator and the art observer, different perspectives emerged related to the same object or representation. These aspects will be discussed by Prof. Zélia Anastácio and Dr. Sónia Oliveira