“You Have Made Your People Hear Hard Things”: Jazz and Medicine as Moral Practice

In Auden’s poem “The Art of Healing,” he writes that “every sickness is a musical problem and every cure a musical solution.” Jazz and health care are two things we normally don’t think about together, let alone in the context of mental health. This conversation was recorded at the 2024 Practice & Presence gathering between theological ethicist Patrick Smith and physician and writer Brewer Eberly. They explores jazz and medicine as moral practice. How does jazz draw out metaphors that help us think about health care and clinical relationships differently? How does jazz teach us to lament and work with uncertainty? As we consider the hard things we have been made to see and hear in health care, how might jazz—a form of art born of oppression and pain—disrupt complacency and awaken us to new ways to live and to heal and to sing?