Bringing Art
into Hospitals The medical world is gradually realizing that
the quality of the (36) in hospitals may play an important
(37) to help patients to get better. As
(38) of nationwide effort in Britain to bring (39)
out (40) the museums and into (41)
places, some of the country’s best artists have (42)
in to change older hospital and to soften the (43)
edges of modern buildings. Of the 2500 national health service
hospitals in Britain, almost 100 now have very valuable collections of present
art in passages, waiting areas and treatment rooms. These recent
movements first (44) by one artist, Peter Senior, who set up
his studio at a Manchester hospital on northeastern England during the early
1970s. He felt the artist had lost his place in modern society, and
(45) he should be enjoyed by a wider audience. A
common hospital waiting room might have (46) 5 000 visitors
each week, what a better place to hold regular exhibitions of art! Senior held
the first exhibition of his own paintings in the out-patients waiting area of
the Manchester Royal Hospital in 1975. Believed to lie Britain’s first hospital
artist, Senior was so much (47) that he was soon joined
(48) a team of six young art school graduates.
The effect is (49) , now in file (50)
and waiting rooms the visitors (51) a full view of
fresh colors, playful images and restful countyards. The quality
of the environment may (52) the used for expensive drugs when
a patient is (53) from all illness. A study has shown that
(54) who halt a view onto garden needed half the number of
strong pain killers compared (55) patients who had no view at
all or only a brick wall to look at.
