The Way of Beauty for Doctors and Medical Practioners - Continuing Education Units in the Way of Beauty through www.Pontifex.University.

The second in a series of postings on the connection between health, beauty, and freedom in the human person and the implications on the practice of medicine.

In an article posted, last month, the first in this series, I pointed out that the topic of health is barely addressed in modern medicine, largely because there is no clear definition of what health is. This leaves many in the medical profession disconcertingly rudderless and without any coherent set of principles to guide what treatments they ought to offer patients.

I suggested the following as a definition. It assumes a Christian anthropology based on biblical teaching and in particular, New Testament references to man as body, soul, and spirit, in 1 Thessalonians and the Letter to Hebrews. :

Health is the optimal condition of freedom of the human person directed to the fulfillment of their end for existence. It is attained through the optimal harmony of all aspects of the human person - body, soul, and spirit

The end of human existence is to be in union with God in eternal happiness.

This week, I will explain how this definition, if we accept it, leads us to a connection with beauty in the human person, and offers doctors the possibility of enhancing their ability to diagnose illness based upon intuition. I am not, incidentally, simply talking of cosmetic surgery here, I am thinking that it will be useful in everyday medicine.

A classical definition of beauty is the radiance of being. Further, and again according to the classical understanding, we can say that something is beautiful to the degree that we can see that its parts are properly in relation to each other; and in such a way that the whole fulfills its purpose well. These are qualities of beauty referred to as ‘due proportion’ and ‘integrity’ respectively.

The final quality that must be present for an object to be beautiful, is ‘clarity’. When an object has clarity, an observer can perceive that it possesses those other qualities - due proportion and integrity. The human person has clarity because we can see his physical appearance and this communicates to both his physical and spiritual well-being. The human soul expresses itself, so to speak, through the human body.

The healthy person, therefore, appears beautiful to those who see him when all aspects, spiritual and material, are in optimal relation to each other; and in such a way that he is free to choose a path that leads to his ultimate end.

A good doctor who has been trained to see how all parts relate to each other will be able to see clearly whether or not the person is healthy, and if not what is lacking. A traditional formation in beauty, such as artists used to receive in their training, would develop the doctor’s ability to see the beauty in the person.

A formation in beauty does not replace medical training, rather it supplements it and gives the doctor greater intuition in reading the signs and test data that medical science can provide. Accordingly, such a doctor can also see what perfections are lacking and so can diagnose illness well.

We are all most fully who we are meant to be in this life when we are healthy. Accordingly, we can say that human beauty is the radiance of human health. Someone who is attuned to seeing the beauty of the whole person will be best able to treat the person for optimal health.

The difficulty with this, one might respond, is that while a doctor can use medical equipment to observe the patient’s physical condition, how can he become adept at reading the spiritual condition?

The answer is that we know of the person's spiritual health by what we observe in the body, because the body is a sign of the state of the soul that governs the whole person. Those adept at reading the signs of the body, which includes what we do and say as well as our physical appearances can discern spiritual well being as well.

This may sound like fantasy to some, but artists would not balk at the idea. Every portrait painter knows that if he is to sell his work, he must paint a physical likeness that communicates also the authentic character and psychology of the person through visual appearances alone. When I was studying portraiture I was told, for example, to focus on the eyes particularly because the ‘eyes are the windows to the soull.

Doctors, could, through a formation in beauty, apply the intuition that the artist uses to paint a good portrait, to enhance their skills in judging health and illness. They are not expected to be experts in treating spiritual matters necessarily, but they cannot be specialists in any aspect of medicine if they do not understand how what they do relates to overall human health, which includes consideration of spiritual dimension of the person.

To read the sign of the body, we must love what we see. We appreciate the beauty of something to the degree that we love it. A formation in beauty enhances our ability to see beauty as the sign of a loving Creator who made or inspired the creation of, what we see. This is why a formation in beauty is a spiritual formation as much as an intellectual and cultural formation. To the degree that we love someone, properly ordered to the nature of that relationship, we see in them what we know to be true for every single human being: they are beautiful in their existence. Even the person who is in ill health is beautiful but not as beautiful as they could be. 

Note: we must be careful in making this argument not to make the mistake of equating a limited understanding of human beauty - beauty as sexual attractiveness - with virtue. This error is easy to fall into and appeals to us at a gut level. The success of the superhero comics and movie franchises, in which every superhero is sexy and heroically virtuous (albeit not virtue as a Catholic might understand it) is, in some ways, based upon the appeal of the false idea.

Our approach is to seek to participate in an ideal of love for each other that is rooted in God’s love for us. God who is Love sees in all people as they are truly beautiful, in a way that is greater than consideration of erotic beauty. And this beauty is physical. This is important, there is no duality here, no separation of spiritual and physical beauty. It is not that saints are physically ugly but spiritually beautiful, for example. The spiritual beauty of the person always expresses itself physically too.. If we fail to see the physical beauty in the person, it is our failure to see the whole person and a reflection of the limitations in our capacity to love and purity of heart.

Such a formation in beauty is not limited to the study of the human person however, it trains us to recognize the pattern which is the source of the beauty of all of the cosmos, which, to quote Benedict XVI in The Spirit of the Liturgy, reflects the pattern of ‘mind of the creator’. This is why the Way of Beauty and Mathematics of Beauty courses at Pontifex University focus on the pattern of the cosmos as much as on idealized human proportions and describe how Christian culture incorporates these proportions into itself beautifully.

This principle of the beauty of the cosmos and of man having a common source is consistent with the words of Gaudium et Spes, a constitution of the Second Vatican Council, which stated:

Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world [ie of the whole cosmos, DC]. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honour since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day [GS14]

The underlying assumption here is that the beauty of every aspect of Creation and of an authentically Catholic Christian culture is a participation in the beauty of God. To the degree that we are inspired by the beauty in our surroundings to look upwards for its origins, we grasp Beauty itself. This in turn becomes an Ideal that is simultaneously a principle of Love that cascades down to us from on high, informing all our interactions with our fellows; and informing all that we do, including the creation of works of art, and the art of practicing medicine.

As an example of how this might work practically, in an appendix of my book, The Way of Beauty I relate a real situation (as described by Prof. Michael Roberto in his Great Course, the Art of Critical Decision Making). It was observed that nurses in cardiac wards would repeatedly call the doctor urgently because they thought that the patient was about to have a heart attack. The doctors would come, and read all the metrics on the equipment to which the patient was connected to see what was happening. On a number of occasions, the doctors made the assessment that it was a false alarm as all the metrics were within the limits of safety, and yet 15 minutes later the patient would suffer a cardiac event. This happened often enough for hospitals to decide to undertake research to find out why the nurses were right and the doctors were wrong.

When interviewed the nurses couldn’t say precisely what they were seeing but talked of their intuition telling them strongly that something strongly that the patient had take a severe turn for the worse. It subsequently emerged that while each individual metric was within safe limits - causing the doctor to assume there was no problem - there were in fact certain combinations, that is certain patterns of metrics, that were nevertheless dangerous. Typically it was highly experienced nurses that noticed such things. They were not reading the pattern of dials on the equipment, rather they were reading subtle patterns of signs in the body and could detect a problem. This was so subtle that they couldn’t describe precisely what they were seeing, they just knew that it was there.

The analysis by the researchers recommended that decision-making processes should be amended to take into account the intuition of experienced practitioners. This sounds reasonable to me. It occurred to me that a formation in beauty would accelerate the ability of nurses to read the signs of the body and so their intuition would be triggered earlier in their careers than it would otherwise.

The other factor, which again was not mentioned by the researchers, is that I suspect that it is highly likely that those nurses who saw the signs in their patients were able to see a decline in their beauty and health because they loved their patients deeply. I’m not sure how you would assess that!