"Alma" – between Art and Medicine
Francisco Goiana da Silva
It seems it was only yesterday that I, divided between the insecure madness of “Fine Arts” and the safety and advancement of “Medicine”, probed every person whose opinion I value about my vocational doubts.
Maybe my uncertainties were not just of a vocational nature. Still, whereas a few years ago the situation allowed investing blindly in a feeling, nowadays simply “liking it” may not be enough.
The epiphany took the form of a simple yet sage advice: “ A good sculptor will never be able to be a good doctor in his spare time, but a good doctor can become even better by being a sculptor in his spare time!” At the time I was unable to understand the complexity of those wise words, and that is why I did not totally agreed with them. However, I took the advice because the path those words pointed to would allow me to have the best of both worlds: the freedom of the “Sculpting Art” and the intellectual elevation of the “Medical Art”.
National examinations, applications, classifications, placements… As fate had it, the Faculty of Medicine took me away from home and posed one of the biggest challenges of my life.
I must confess that adaptation was neither easy nor quick. Masked as the “bass drum freshman” and as “valiant worrier of the praxis”, there was no room for artistic mawkishness or excessive sensitivity in this new world. I believed then that hiding my “differences” was the best way to protect myself. Still, since no one can annul an essential part of oneself all the time, I felt a crying need to “escape” to Santo Tirso every weekend. There, in a “shack” turned into a studio, the “artistic impulse” remained alive. It was a form of “Art” that seemed to have nothing in common with the often repetitive, boring and vague theoretical discourse we were forced to interiorize on the importance of art in medical education during the long afternoons of the workshops.
Why would it be logical to think that art would make me a better doctor? Would talking to patients about the overwhelming decoration of the roof of the Sistine Chapel help them heal faster?
As student life is not truly without an overwhelming passion, I fell in love! This love made me feel at home in Lisbon and the Faculty. This love made me invest all hours and minutes! This love made me live with hallucinating intensity, smile and cry. This love was and is the AEFML. This love has hardened me, and eventually gave me the sufficient confidence to assume my difference: medical student, artist, eccentric, and a megalomaniac.
And it was only when my “love” asked me that I brought my artistic creation to my life in the city. After a month of seclusion in Santo Tirso, to celebrate FMUL’s one-hundredth anniversary AEFMUL offered the Faculty a piece high enough to leave the great masters gasping. A sculpture called “the transmission of knowledge” was inaugurated outside the Egas Moniz Building, where it still stands.
What many people will never imagine were the undertakings that many had to go through to get the piece to its location. But this would be sufficient material to write another article like this one.
I felt a tremendous power seeing so many diverse reactions about the sculpture “the transmission of knowledge”: the power to make people stop and think; the power to interfere with the minds of those who appreciate it. There I found my true meaning of Art: art as Soul that inhabits some objects and unsettles us. Therefore, every mocking criticism or sketch done at a “Night of Medicine” regarding the famous “busts of the Egas Moniz Building” constitute, above all, proof that people are not indifferent to this “trial” Art, whether they like it or not, but that is another matter.
After all, the strength of art is not the ability to have a scholarly conversation with a patient. The real power of art lies in the capacity to touch the soul and sensitivity of patients.
In medical education there is a thin balance between excessive sensitivity and distant and defensive coldness. Thus, one the one hand, it was thanks to AEFML and FMUL that I publically disclosed my facet as a “sculptor” at the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the Faculty, and, on the other, it was thanks to them that I changed and became tougher, in the belief that it was more correct to neuter much of my sensitivity. This happened during my term as President and during the clinical years of the degree.
In fact, “Kiko” the artist, the eccentric and special being, was not the same as the other “Kiko”, almost a doctor and President of AEFML. At the time I used to think: “Who will pay attention to an eccentric? What patient will trust an artist doctor?
I stopped disclosing my emotions …
I ceased to express my opinions …
I toughened up!
Once again, the need to escape came back, as well as the urgency to find a place where I could express everything inside my Soul. That place was the “shack” turned into a studio. Stone became my voice.
Little by little, I naturally discovered a new freedom.
Little by little, silent outbursts took shape.
When I finished the degree a few months ago, I realized that maybe it was time to stop and, once and for all, give full voice to my hands. I was a kid who had become a doctor, and a doctor who, once again, had become a sensitive dreamy human being.
I came to realize that probably I had been wrong all along and that I will have much more ability to “touch” the people around me (as a doctor, politician or manager) the more I am true with myself and with what I really am.
Twelve pieces are on display at the palace Centeno (former rector’s office of the UTL) in which you will surely find a message, a longing, a feeling of admiration, of sadness, because at the end of a long six -year journey, they are the voice of a liberated soul.
The opening ceremony of the sculpture exhibition “Alma- entre a Arte e a Medicina” (Soul – between Art and Medicine) was a special occasion. Supported by UL, FMUL and AEFML, it as an almost magical moment. There were no barriers between teachers and students, because art united generations and factions.
In art we are all sensitive and alike. In art we are all fragile. The new leadership will emerge from the fusion between the empty pragmatism in which we live today and the culture, art and humanity that will makes us believe again in the future.
I would like to challenge all FMUL students to dare to be different. Be more than what is actually required of you. Read, write, practice sports, travel! Those will undoubtedly be the differences, not shown in the degree classifications, which will make you stand out in the crowd.
Learn more about the young doctor and sculptor by clicking the links below: "Alma"
"Alma"
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