Imagination and Health

Posted by John Graham-Pole

Artmaking always uses imagination, that magical quality which seems to single us humans out as unique from every other living being. In our minority culture, most people think of making art as confined to very special people whom we put up on pedestals for their rarified talent. But I’m much more interested in artists who aren’t in it to become famous, but rather to give loving care to other people, and so move the world forward. This is an immense challenge but as fully worthwhile as nursing the sick. Florence Nightingale spoke of  nursing as “an art… as hard as any painter’s or sculptor’s work.”

I’ve worked for 30 years with these artists who use their imagination to enhance people’s healing. The hundreds of artists I’ve known who do this work always seem to bring to it a joyful fearlessness in the face of chaos—and chaos is what every seriously ill person’s life has become. This creative power has always been a source of building close connections between human beings. Witness the prehistoric cave art of our forbears in Africa and Europe, which shows these preverbal peoples living at the interface of the visible and invisible, conspiring with nature to unify their bodies, minds, and spirits.

For our ancestors, external life may well have been “nasty, brutish, and short,” as 16th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes called it, but when they could access the unity of body, mind and spirit, it must have always been a peak experience—what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls being “in flow.” When we can enter such a highly focused state of imagination, I believe we’re at our very healthiest, whatever our external situation may be.

I had a love-hate relationship with science throughout my forty years as a doctor. At the same time, I grew more and more comfortable with intuitive knowledge, using my imagination as a vital part of my intelligence to help the healing of people who came to me in need. Intuition is what I think John Keats, who graduated as a doctor from London University 150 years before me, was talking about when he wrote about “the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.” This is not to dismiss science lock, stock and barrel from healthcare, but simply to say that art has got very short shrift in medicine’s modern preoccupation with science and technology. Many of our medical colleges still see the humanities—the study of human culture and society—as a rather wasteful indulgence with no place in healing from sickness and disability.

Children were always my best teachers. It was they who first guided me towards the close connection between art and healing. I watched how they used their creative intelligence—their imagination—to tackle hugely hard conditions, especially the cancers that beset so many of those in my care. This imaginative aspect of our intelligence instinctively seeks to make sense of frightening or confusing things that feel beyond our physical control. I like to think of children as artists in life, but the nature of school curricula, well-meaning though they may be, has inevitably forced young minds into a mind-numbing state that suppresses imagination.

When I was a hospice director, I sometimes found it helpful to write a poem about a child or teenager who had died. It was both a means to deal with my grief and a way to bear witness to, even celebrate, a short life well lived. A sixteen-year-old girl I cared for died on a respirator. At her request, I spent her last 36 hours at her bedside. Looking back, I think she knew instinctively that the best thing she could do for herself over the remaining hours of her life was to have me close beside her. For myself, it was as if we shared something of our bodies—our cellular structure—during those quiet hours:  

Cell Shed

I lean in among the plastic tubes besetting you,

my breath voluntary, yours urged.

Our cells mingle each with each other’s,

spilling in spindrift of air-water-ice between mouths.

You, going, dying, take my life to rest.

I, living, left, draw in, exhale your seed.

Nearing the last breath of this young woman’s life, I drew as close to her as modern medicine’s paraphernalia would allow. At such close quarters, I got the strong intuition of her dying cells being shed directly into my own breath, while I was breathing my own fully alive cells back into her. I had the perhaps fanciful thought that I was bearing off something of her immortality into our temporal world, while she was transporting a fragment of my earthly body to rest with her in her afterlife. A peaceful feeling. A peaceful death.

Imagination is self-taught—or better said, self-learned. Dreams and memories evoke our present feelings and thoughts. Imagination helps us solve problems and to integrate our experience and our learning throughout our lives.