Music and Medicine
It is shortly after 5 p.m. on a sunny April afternoon, and every single seat in the auditorium of Stanford’s James H. Clark Center—home to the Bio-X Program—
is full. All eyes are on master’s of science in medicine student Christine McLeavey,
T he event is Stanford’s eighth anual Medicine and the Muse symposium, which highlights the ways in which arts, humanities, and medicine intertwine. Community members, undergraduate, graduate, and MD students, postdocs, faculty, and friends fill the audience. They have already enjoyed the jazz stylings of Groove Appeal; a sexy, poignant cover of A Fine Frenzy’s Almost Lover; and a couple of literary readings. Still ahead: Stanford’s musicians-in-residence, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, will perform the scherzos from Beethoven’s first and last quartets, with witty commentary by composer-teacher-media personality Rob Kapilow. There will be clap-along audience participation as well.
But right now, it is McLeavey’s haunting performance of Liebestraum that brings a hush to the auditorium. She shares Liszt’s promise of the love that happens after infatuation, after passion, based on a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath: “Love as long as you can! The hour will come when you will stand at the grave and mourn.” It is love and death, music and medicine, all in the key of A-flat major.
When McLeavey says, “Choosing between music and science has been the ongoing debate in my life,” she is not exaggerating. Her physics studies at Princeton University were followed with a master’s degree in piano performance at Juilliard. And having finished her master’s of science in medicine at Stanford earlier this spring, she’s now pursuing a PhD in neuroscience.
But as gifted and interdisciplinary as McLeavey is, she is not as rare a bird as you might think. Music and medicine are frequent fellow travelers, partly because both depend on the ability to listen. In fact, the stethoscope was invented by a French physician-flautist (Rene-Theophile-Hyacinthe Laennec, in 1816), and some of the earliest hand-carved wooden versions were carried in beautiful flute-like, silk-lined cases.
The Art of Listening
In “Music, Medicine, and the Art of Listening,” a 2006 article in the Journal for Learning through the Arts, co-authors Peter van Roessel, MD ’07, PhD, and Audrey Shafer, MD ’83, professor, department of anesthesia and director, Arts, who, in front of a few hundred strangers, is about to undertake a high-risk operation: She will perform one of the piano canon’s most iconic pieces—Liszt’s 1850 Liebestraum. Under her hands, it will sound brand new.
Humanities, and Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, explore some of the ways medicine and music connect. Van Roessel, a gifted cellist now completing his second year of psychiatric residency at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, explains the connection this way: “Both music and medicine require a similar commitment to reflective practice–to reviewing how an encounter has gone from multiple perspectives, both in the moment and after the fact. Both are performance arts, in that they require intense concentration and the repeated practice of a set of skills. And in medicine, as in music, the more practiced you are, the more able you are to listen and respond to others as you perform.
As examples of the art of listening, van Roessel and Shafer cite physician-composers like Alexander Borodin, friends-of-physicians like Johannes Brahms, and pieces inspired by illness (Ludwig van Beethoven’s A Convalescent’s Holy Song of Thanks in the Op. 132 quartet). As van Roessel points out, “Theodore Billroth, Brahms’ best friend, was not just any doctor. He was also one of the pioneers of surgery.” Shafer and van Roessel examined studies on the therapeutic value of listening to live music, neuroscience studies of the “brain on music,” and medical specialties addressing disorders specific to musicians. But as rich as their article is, it barely scratches the surface of medicine-plus-music possibilities.
Consider the orchestra of faculty, staff, and students at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, now in its 27th season, founded by faculty member, internist, composer, and violinist Stephen Moshman. There’s also the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1982 by medical students and physicians in the Boston area; combining music and philanthropy, the orchestra’s Healing Art of Music program raises funds to care for the medically underserved.
At Stanford, the late Larry Mathers ’66, MD ’82, PhD ’71, professor of pediatrics and surgery, who loved Dizzy Gillespie as well as Sir Edward Elgar, would refresh himself—and passersby—by playing piano in the atrium of Stanford Hospital & Clinics. And many other Stanford musician-scientists and musician-physicians continue his tradition. James Zehnder, MD, professor of medicine and pathology at the School of Medicine, who has played cello since he was a child, gave music a rest during medical school and residency, but began studying again once he was at Stanford. Now, he participates in the music department’s chamber music program and annual seminar with the St. Lawrence String Quartet. “Music is a nice diversion for me. It is challenging, and I like having something to work on. Plus, hanging out with musicians is a lot different from hanging out with physicians. It opens up my life, and the opportunity to make music is wonderful. When it all comes together, it feels great.”
A Love of Storytelling
For Cindy Mong, ’04, MD ’08, it was a passion for music that led her to medicine. She and her twin sister started Suzuki training at age 6, and by age 16, Mong was studying with Heidi Castleman at the Aspen Music Festival. “On the first day, she pulled out this big body chart with all of the muscles outlined and she began to teach the anatomy of playing,” Mong says. “That got me interested in medicine and in the study of physiology. It is useful to know how to alter the sound you produce or be able to play for long periods without pain.” Mong played jazz and classical music as an undergraduate and throughout medical school, and has organized bimonthly concerts for the elderly. She is a former principal violist for the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and a fellow of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Music Center. Her twin sister, Sandy, who finished Harvard Medical School in 2009, plays first violin as concertmaster of the Longwood Symphony.
For Mong, the connection between music and medicine emerges through storytelling. “I enjoy hearing a patient’s whole story, to understand the larger picture,” she says. “You have to listen with care, pay attention to the minute detail. Learning a piece of music and turning it into something beautiful beyond the technical detail is a similar process.” She also describes music as the perfect prescription for the rigors of internship. “Being an intern kills your soul a little bit,” Mong says. “You are dealing with patients with huge problems, and sometimes grim prognoses. And if something goes wrong, you may feel like it is your fault. Music provides me with a sense of beauty, hope, and awe. It keeps me invigorated and reminds me of the small things that make life worth living.”
Anything but Dilettantes
What is most striking about musicians who also pursue medicine is the seriousness they bring to both practices. Steven Lin, a fourth-year medical student at Stanford, composer and pianist, describes “struggling in the choice between a music school and a traditional undergraduate college.”
Before beginning college, Lin completed a degree in piano performance at London College of Music. And while at Stanford School of Medicine, he created an original play, The Beautiful Sadness, because he noted the striking absence of teaching about death and dying in medical school. “Music,” he says, “keeps me in touch with humanity. Sometimes we are so focused on treating the illness that we forget to treat the person. Poets and musicians and artists are far more in touch with the human experience.”
Lin feels so strongly about what the arts bring to medicine that he says, “Being involved in an art—photography, poetry, music, whatever—makes a person a better physician by keeping them in touch with their human side. All the doctors I know who are great with patients participate in the arts. It seems to help them practice the artistry of medicine as well.”
Dusk has fallen outside the auditorium at the Clark Center. Christine McLeavey sounds the final, broken chord of Liebestraum, and the audience breathes it in and breaks into applause. It is an auditorium of clinicians and researchers and undergraduates and medical students and residents and patients (past, present, and future) and ordinary citizens. And in that moment, we are all together, music-lovers sharing the same music. Then we step out into the warm, spring night, listening to internal soundtracks—Mozart or Gershwin or the seductive funk of George Clinton—that are uniquely our own.