Lecture series speaker shares idea of ‘seeing illness through art’

October 4, 2024

Dr. Devan Stahl will forever remember seeing the image, the product of a medical test many years ago.

To her, the image, an MRI of her brain, was at once unremarkable. Later, her interpretation of the gray image changed dramatically. From scary and mysterious to enlightening, transcendent and empowering.

The neurologist on that day opened his computer and scrolled through the images - Stahl's images - on the screen. He quickly noticed the white spots, she later wrote for U.S. Catholic, "that shouldn't be there, which represented missing nerve connections."

You have multiple sclerosis, he told her without emotion. Flatly, coldly, decidedly. He knew little about Stahl, if anything, beyond that image, that one, flawed part of her.

He had made the diagnosis. The MRI was indisputable. He interpreted the image, which showed a small part of a body. Just one part, clinically separating it, as was trained to do, from the living, loving, caring humans who endured the scan and anxiously awaited the results.

"I became an object of my physicians," said Stahl. "I was not a person with a history embedded in relationships. I was an MS patient," an autoimmune disease, Stahl wrote, "that causes the immune system to attack the central nervous system and disrupt nerve connections."

Stahl, who spoke to Campbell University students gathered in Butler Chapel, has largely dedicated her career toward the idea of physicians and patients gaining a great understanding of illness and how it affects people. Not patients, necessarily, but rather as unique, emotion-filled human beings.

Stahl, an assistant professor of Bioethics and Religion in the Department of Religion at Baylor University, specializes in disability theology, bioethics and the visual arts within medicine, her bio says,

She teaches bioethics and disability ethics to undergraduate and graduate students in religion, medical students and clinicians. She also trained as a hospital chaplain and works as a clinical ethicist consultant. She has written several books, including her latest, "Disability's Challenge to Theology: Genes, Eugenics, and the Metaphysics of Modern Medicine," and is co-host of a popular podcast, "Bioethics for the People."

She offered two lectures on campus Oct. 1 as part of the second annual Biomedical Humanities Lecture Series, presented by the Department of Christian Studies, sponsored by the Staley Distinguished Scholar Lecture Program.

"To avoid having hopeless despair, I needed to make sense of my illness. I learned as much as I could about my clinical diagnosis. I read a philosophy of medicine and how others learned to cope. … I went to my pastors to ask what it meant that I was sick," Stahl said in her first lecture, which focused on finding meaning in medicine through fine art.

Stahl saw myriad specialists, underwent countless MRIs. In search of answers. Someone to see what she could not.

She turned to her sister, Darian Goldin Stahl, an artist, educator and health researcher.

"As an artist, my sister … helped me to see my body differently. So years after my dialysis, she presented me with this."

She turned to an image, presented to her audience at the chapel on a large screen.

The stark, black and white image is, after close study, that of a woman, seemingly frozen in ice. One arm above her head, the other at her side. She's lying on what looks like a rock, her face leaning upward, her feet pointing inward, one reaching toward the other.

"Bright spots float around the image," Devan Stahl wrote, "signifying the spots on my MRI scans. The image represents me and my experience of illness, which is sometimes cold and alienating but sometimes radiant and mysterious."

In the image, called "Numb," Darian sees the woman as looking inward, contemplating herself, Devan says. "I see it looking upward, contemplating her transcendence, her place in the universe.

"Rather than using a picture of me," she wrote, "Darian used a picture of herself to represent me. By substituting her flesh for my own, Darian became a part of my illness narrative, as well as a part of my body image. Whereas I had only ever seen my illness represented in an MRI scan, I now had another new image of my ill body, which captured something important about my experience of my body in illness."

Devan started sending her MRIs to her sister, who transformed them into art.

A whole-body experience, Stahl says, sometimes cold and alienated, but other times radiant and hopeful, disrupting the way we often see our bodies, our sickness.

Showing how a simple thing, a medical image, can be read and interpreted in multiple ways, Stahl says. How this might help patients deal with illness, help doctors reconnect with their patients, and to help us see people with illness and disabilities a little differently.

Seeing bodies not only as a complex matrix of organs, muscle and tissue often detached from the whole.

"Mine is a fragile and wounded body, but it is also a body that cannot be reduced to a single image or medical diagnosis," Stahl wrote. " … Darian's art exalts the ill and disabled body - making it seem powerful and mysterious. Through her art, Darian transforms my woundedness into an opportunity for beauty and communion."

Stahl's second lecture, "Wondrous Monsters: What Anomalous Bodies Teach Us About God," focused on how early modern debates surrounding the meaning of so-called "monstrous births" inform contemporary understandings of disability, ethics and even the nature of God.

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