- Email: [email protected]
Tales of training
Perspectives
the genius of a ballet dancer using electromyography. Paintings are treated as mere isolated stimuli or sets of stimuli. Mondrian’s canvasses, for example, are simply means of preferentially exciting V4 pathways. The works and our experiences of them are divorced from their cultural context, and from the viewer’s individual history. Onians’ approach is not only reductive but also mechanistic. If Mondrian’s paintings work in a certain way, it is difficult to see how they took so long to be accepted, how different people evaluate them differently, and how we react to them differently on different occasions. Works of art are not merely sources of stimuli that act on bits of the brain. More than anything else, they engage us as human beings. Their impact will reach deep into our personal depths, which in turn will have been shaped by the culture in which we grew up.
Works of art, what is more, are in dialogue with the broader culture in which they are produced; with other works in the same and different genres; and with the earlier and later works of the same artist. They invite us not only to have experiences but to reflect on our experiences; not merely to have visual tingles but to think about what is before us. In the case of representational works, we are invited to reflect on what is shown, to accept or refuse the symbolic significance, to rejoice in the beauty of the world or deplore its horror. The extraordinary sequence of Rembrandt self-portraits is not merely a succession of lines and coloured surfaces but a profound meditation on the course and tragic beauty of human life. An array of pixels or voxels, lit up or not, hardly captures that. Onians’ art lover is an anhistoric brain, whose activity is not qualitatively different from that of a chimpanzee.
Onians is aware that his approach will not necessarily command immediate acceptance. His tendency to praise those of his predecessors who came closest to his ideas is a preemptive strike on reactionary souls who resist the notion that aesthetics is a branch of neurobiology. He expresses outrage that Semir Zeki has to defend his neurological approach to art. And yet Zeki is much more circumspect. He admits that our knowledge of the brain is “certainly not enough to account in neurological terms for aesthetic experience”. And Onians himself notes that Zeki’s approach “enables him to set aside the emotional content of art, its ability to disturb, arouse and inspire”. This would seem to leave out everything that is of interest in art and so discredit neuroaesthetics.
Raymond Tallis [email protected]
In brief Book Tales of training
Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures Vincent Lam. Fourth Estate, 2008. Pp 400. £12·99. ISBN 978-0-007-26380-6.
20
In the story that opens this collection, we meet two students preparing for medical school. Ming and Fitzgerald want to be physicians for “service, humanity, giving”, an explanation that “felt easy and immune from questioning”, if perhaps “somewhat improvised”. In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, physician Vincent Lam explores what happens when this improvised idealism meets the reality of medical school, the medical profession, and life in 12 interwoven short stories. Ming fits the stereotype of a highachieving young Asian driven to honour her parents, but she has a dark secret. Fitz says he “likes being obsessed by things”, and knows in his heart that if it wasn’t medicine, it would have been something else. We follow them, and their peers
Chen and Sri, from the near-holy experience of their first dissection to the disillusionment and sleep deprivation of residency. These vivid characters, and in fact everyone who populates this collection— prostitutes, policemen, criminals, the insane, more physicians—evade our expectations, just like real people. The collection’s strongest stories are written from the perspective of Chen, who is, like Lam himself, an emergency physician living in Toronto from a Chinese family who were expatriates in Vietnam. One of these stories, “A Long Migration”, is like a calm, meditative breath between feverish accounts of codes, SARS, and central lines. Chen has just finished his first year of medical school, and spends time with his dying grandfather in Australia. He is hoping to use this time to track
down the truth of conflicting family stories about his grandfather. But the truth is not so easy to find, Chen learns, because his grandfather’s versions of the tales “could shift from morning to evening”. Lam’s description of the old man’s storytelling is an apt metaphor for this riveting, surprising, and often beautiful narrative. “Rarely did a new version of the story require the old one to be untrue”, he writes. “Instead, it was as if the new telling washed the story in a different color, filling in gaps and loose ends so as to invert my previous understanding of the plot.” Coming to terms with such ambiguity, Lam’s stories show, is part of the process of becoming a physician.
Anne Harding [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 372 July 5, 2008
the genius of a ballet dancer using electromyography. Paintings are treated as mere isolated stimuli or sets of stimuli. Mondrian’s canvasses, for example, are simply means of preferentially exciting V4 pathways. The works and our experiences of them are divorced from their cultural context, and from the viewer’s individual history. Onians’ approach is not only reductive but also mechanistic. If Mondrian’s paintings work in a certain way, it is difficult to see how they took so long to be accepted, how different people evaluate them differently, and how we react to them differently on different occasions. Works of art are not merely sources of stimuli that act on bits of the brain. More than anything else, they engage us as human beings. Their impact will reach deep into our personal depths, which in turn will have been shaped by the culture in which we grew up.
Works of art, what is more, are in dialogue with the broader culture in which they are produced; with other works in the same and different genres; and with the earlier and later works of the same artist. They invite us not only to have experiences but to reflect on our experiences; not merely to have visual tingles but to think about what is before us. In the case of representational works, we are invited to reflect on what is shown, to accept or refuse the symbolic significance, to rejoice in the beauty of the world or deplore its horror. The extraordinary sequence of Rembrandt self-portraits is not merely a succession of lines and coloured surfaces but a profound meditation on the course and tragic beauty of human life. An array of pixels or voxels, lit up or not, hardly captures that. Onians’ art lover is an anhistoric brain, whose activity is not qualitatively different from that of a chimpanzee.
Onians is aware that his approach will not necessarily command immediate acceptance. His tendency to praise those of his predecessors who came closest to his ideas is a preemptive strike on reactionary souls who resist the notion that aesthetics is a branch of neurobiology. He expresses outrage that Semir Zeki has to defend his neurological approach to art. And yet Zeki is much more circumspect. He admits that our knowledge of the brain is “certainly not enough to account in neurological terms for aesthetic experience”. And Onians himself notes that Zeki’s approach “enables him to set aside the emotional content of art, its ability to disturb, arouse and inspire”. This would seem to leave out everything that is of interest in art and so discredit neuroaesthetics.
Raymond Tallis [email protected]
In brief Book Tales of training
Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures Vincent Lam. Fourth Estate, 2008. Pp 400. £12·99. ISBN 978-0-007-26380-6.
20
In the story that opens this collection, we meet two students preparing for medical school. Ming and Fitzgerald want to be physicians for “service, humanity, giving”, an explanation that “felt easy and immune from questioning”, if perhaps “somewhat improvised”. In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, physician Vincent Lam explores what happens when this improvised idealism meets the reality of medical school, the medical profession, and life in 12 interwoven short stories. Ming fits the stereotype of a highachieving young Asian driven to honour her parents, but she has a dark secret. Fitz says he “likes being obsessed by things”, and knows in his heart that if it wasn’t medicine, it would have been something else. We follow them, and their peers
Chen and Sri, from the near-holy experience of their first dissection to the disillusionment and sleep deprivation of residency. These vivid characters, and in fact everyone who populates this collection— prostitutes, policemen, criminals, the insane, more physicians—evade our expectations, just like real people. The collection’s strongest stories are written from the perspective of Chen, who is, like Lam himself, an emergency physician living in Toronto from a Chinese family who were expatriates in Vietnam. One of these stories, “A Long Migration”, is like a calm, meditative breath between feverish accounts of codes, SARS, and central lines. Chen has just finished his first year of medical school, and spends time with his dying grandfather in Australia. He is hoping to use this time to track
down the truth of conflicting family stories about his grandfather. But the truth is not so easy to find, Chen learns, because his grandfather’s versions of the tales “could shift from morning to evening”. Lam’s description of the old man’s storytelling is an apt metaphor for this riveting, surprising, and often beautiful narrative. “Rarely did a new version of the story require the old one to be untrue”, he writes. “Instead, it was as if the new telling washed the story in a different color, filling in gaps and loose ends so as to invert my previous understanding of the plot.” Coming to terms with such ambiguity, Lam’s stories show, is part of the process of becoming a physician.
Anne Harding [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 372 July 5, 2008