Hippocrates Cafe: Exploring Public Health through Art

Many people recognize Hippocrates in the context of medicine, but they don’t usually associate Hippocrates with the performing arts. In order to help draw connections between the world of medicine and the world of art, Dr. Jon Hallberg, medical director of the University of Minnesota Physicians Mill City Clinic, created Hippocrates Cafe,  an ever-changing series of performances that explores health care topics through live art such as spoken word, music, and body movement.

The idea is to examine the complexities of public health from multiple angles so that audiences can get a full sense of the issue being discussed. For example, performers may read poetry or news articles written during the 1918 flu pandemic, accompanied by music composed during that period of history to bring audiences into that world and see it through the eyes of people who actually lived through it.

Reading first hand accounts of illness and listening to the art inspired by public health events is one way to help audiences engage with histories they may not have otherwise encountered. Hippocrates Cafe has been regionally lauded as an accessible way for audiences of all backgrounds to contextualize and relate to the various personal, social, and systemic aspects of healthcare.

In the last nine years, Hippocrates Cafe has crafted over 80 unique performances in 8 different states, and for the first time since its creation in 2009, Hippocrates Cafe held a performance at Carleton. As a special opportunity for the Carleton community, Hippocrates Cafe invited a select group of students to participate in the creative process for the performance. In a successful feat of cross-departmental collaboration, professors Debby Walser-Kuntz (Biology), Amna Khalid (History), and Mara Block (Religion), dedicated a portion of their courses to one central topic that could be addressed by Hippocrates Cafe.

For this performance, students from three different disciplines researched the ethics of healthcare and inequality, and the research they collected was given to the Hippocrates Cafe performers to then organize into a show. The practice of examining a large issue from multiple perspectives is a clear example of the liberal arts at work. Moreover, the opportunity for student research to be featured in a public performance is one of the many ways Carleton students and faculty are involved in public scholarship.

After weeks of planning and prepping, Hippocrates Cafe debuted at Carleton on May 14, 2018 in the Weitz theater. The theater was packed, with some spectators sitting on staircases and standing along the walls to see the show. While the performance itself was short and to-the-point, the audience had a lot of material to unpack. Hippocrates Cafe shared harrowing personal accounts written about leprosy, the Black Death, AIDS, and how these epidemics touched personal lives and impacted society. The performance guided the audience through multiple periods of public health crises through spoken word and music, helping make large-scale issues easier to process.

Hippocrates Cafe is one of many recent examples of civically engaged art at Carleton, and certainly not the last opportunity to participate in academic civic engagement or public scholarship and art on campus. Stay tuned for more information on how to be involved.