Name an illness, medical condition, or disease and you will find quiltmaking associated with it. From Alzheimer's to Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Lou Gehrig's Disease to Crigler-Najjar Syndrome, and for nearly every form of cancer, millions of quilts have been made in support of personal well-being, health education, patient advocacy, memorialization of victims, and fundraising. In Quilts and Health, Marsha MacDowell, Clare Luz, and Beth Donaldson explore the long historical connection between textiles and health and its continued and ever growing importance in contemporary society. This lavishly illustrated book brings together hundreds of health-related quilts—with imagery from abstract patterns to depictions of fibromyalgia to an ovarian cancer diary—and the stories behind the art, as told by makers, recipients, healthcare professionals, and many others. This incredible book speaks to the healing power of quilts and quiltmaking and to the deep connections between art and health.
Name an illness, medical condition, or disease and you will find quiltmaking associated with it. From Alzheimer's to Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Lou Gehrig's Disease to Crigler-Najjar Syndrome, and for nearly every form of cancer, millions of quilts have been made in support of personal well-being, health education, patient advocacy, memorialization of victims, and fundraising. In Quilts and Health, Marsha MacDowell, Clare Luz, and Beth Donaldson explore the long historical connection between textiles and health and its continued and ever growing importance in contemporary society. This lavishly illustrated book brings together hundreds of health-related quilts—with imagery from abstract patterns to depictions of fibromyalgia to an ovarian cancer diary—and the stories behind the art, as told by makers, recipients, healthcare professionals, and many others. This incredible book speaks to the healing power of quilts and quiltmaking and to the deep connections between art and health.
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Overview
Name an illness, medical condition, or disease and you will find quiltmaking associated with it. From Alzheimer's to Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Lou Gehrig's Disease to Crigler-Najjar Syndrome, and for nearly every form of cancer, millions of quilts have been made in support of personal well-being, health education, patient advocacy, memorialization of victims, and fundraising. In Quilts and Health, Marsha MacDowell, Clare Luz, and Beth Donaldson explore the long historical connection between textiles and health and its continued and ever growing importance in contemporary society. This lavishly illustrated book brings together hundreds of health-related quilts—with imagery from abstract patterns to depictions of fibromyalgia to an ovarian cancer diary—and the stories behind the art, as told by makers, recipients, healthcare professionals, and many others. This incredible book speaks to the healing power of quilts and quiltmaking and to the deep connections between art and health.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253032270 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/05/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 56 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Marsha MacDowell is Professor of Art, Art History, and Design at Michigan State University, Curator of Folk Arts at the Michigan State University Museum, and Director of the Quilt Index (www.quiltindex.org). She has authored many publications on traditional material culture and quiltmaking, including Quilts and Human Rights and Ubuntutu.
Clare Luz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Michigan State University. She is a gerontologist whose research focuses on quality of life for vulnerable older adults, long-term care health services, and the intersection of health, creativity, and the arts.
Beth Donaldson is Digital Humanities Project Asset Coordinator at the Michigan State University Museum and Coordinator of the Quilt Index. She is a quilt maker and coauthor of Quilts and Human Rights, among other publications on quilts.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Evidence of the Impact of Quilts and Quiltmaking on Health and Health-Care Outcomes
Literature on the association between quilts, quiltmaking, well-being, health, and health-care outcomes is still sparse. The majority of scholarly studies lack rigorous scientific research designs or deep humanistic investigation. There are few that have used randomized control groups, representative samples, or standardized instruments to measure indicators of health and clinical outcomes. Many of the qualitative studies are limited in their sample size or methods. However, there is no denying the accumulation of an astronomical amount of anecdotal evidence that clearly links quilts and health, from which we have gleaned just a fraction for this book. One could argue that when so many narratives are amassed, all indicating the same thing, the collective no longer fits the common definition of anecdotal, individual case examples, stories based on hearsay rather than on hard facts and statistical confirmation.
On the contrary, the data that have been compiled related specifically to quilts and health suggest findings that are anything but atypical. Further, they are conducive to being investigated using sound, replicable scientific methods as well as deeper humanistic exploration. Indeed, this field of inquiry is growing, just as it has in the area of testing the association of the arts in general with health outcomes. It is wide open for such critical analyses, and we posit that as such studies are undertaken, the empirical evidence will substantiate what we already believe to be true: that quilts, as they are used today and have been for centuries, equal good health. We will even go as far as suggesting that there are ways in which quilts can be distinguished from other art forms in terms of their therapeutic and clinical value. In this chapter we explore the current evidence for our claim and invite scholars to take on the challenge of closing gaps in knowledge so that the richness of this art form, and associated stories, can contribute to more holistic, person-centered healthcare practices and, as a result, improved quality of life, health, and healthcare outcomes.
Methods
We started our research for this book with several guiding tenets. The primary objective was to explore the prevalence, use, meaning, and impact of quilts related specifically to health, whether for therapeutic, educational, fundraising, or other purposes. We were particularly interested in the stories behind the quilts. Multiple methods of data collection have been used since 2011, including posting requests on two major quilt-related blog sites and two Facebook pages — Quilts and Health and Quilts Vintage and Antique — which, all combined, have nearly three thousand members. Blog and Facebook news feeds were also culled for relevant posts from other sites, which produced nearly three thousand news and journal articles. In addition, email requests were sent to eleven hundred quilt guilds across the United States asking them to share the invitation with their members. This generated 105 responses from individuals who hoped to have their quilts and stories recognized.
All of those who responded to these appeals were asked to complete a "Quilts and Health" documentation form. The form asked for extensive information on the quiltmaker, including demographics and their quiltmaking history, such as how they learned to quilt; from whom, when, and why they quilt; how many quilts they have made; and whether they belong to a guild. Data were also collected on the quilts themselves, including when they were made; where, why, and by whom; and how they are or were used.
Finally, an extensive search was undertaken of the massive Quilt Index archives, a digital repository of more than eighty thousand quilts, each with an associated, completed data collection form similar to that just described. In all of these searches, multiple key words were used, such as "quilts," "quilters," "quiltmaking," "health," "cancer" and names of other diseases, and "well-being." The searches resulted in an almost unmanageable amount of data, and we then faced the task of reading, organizing, and analyzing the wealth of riches we gathered.
The focus of this chapter is on the empirical evidence for an association between quilts and health, gleaned from close to one hundred academic journal articles. The primary inclusion criteria included a focus on measurable health indicators, such as stress, anxiety, grief, coping, and a sense of well-being, and factors that affect health, such as creative expression and opportunities for affirmation, feeling heard, constructively venting anger, and processing grief. Data collection and analyses will go on for years, but we are excited to share what we have learned thus far.
Arts and Health
As the scholarly literature on the specific association between health and quilts is still limited, we first turned to a growing body of literature that provided empirical evidence supporting the relationship of art in general to improved health and healing. It is reasonable to believe that in many cases the findings from these studies could be relevant to quilts as well. Studies that use multiple forms of art therapy have provided insight, such as Edward A. Ross, Tracy L. Hollen, and Bridget M. Fitzgerald's study on the impact of an Arts-in-Medicine (AIM) program in an outpatient hemodialysis unit on a broad measure of quality of life. These researchers built on a highly successful twenty-year AIM program at their home institution, the University of Florida, that involved artists providing opportunities to engage in artwork, crocheting, crafts, poetry, and playing musical instruments. The Medical Outcomes Study 36-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36) and Beck Depression Scale were administered to forty-six patients at baseline and at six months, and clinical outcomes were tracked, including the percentage of perceived dialysis time, interdialytic weight gain, and predialysis lab results. At six months there was significant improvement in certain lab and hemodialysis parameters, a trend toward less depression, and a correlation between high participation in AIM and improved social function and bodily pain.
Heather L. Stuckey and Jeremy Nobel contributed greatly to this field by conducting an extensive literature review exploring the relationship between engagement in the creative arts and health outcomes. Four major areas of scholarship related to arts and health care emerged: music engagement, visual arts therapy, movement-based creative expression, and expressive writing. Stuckey and Nobel's findings confirm that although art therapy has been used clinically for more than a century, the vast majority of the literature is theoretical in nature without attention to measurable outcome, and only recently have systematic studies been undertaken. Music has been perhaps the most researched medium, and evidence exists of its beneficial impact on decreasing anxiety, reducing pain, and increasing a sense of control, immunity, and wellness among patients suffering with chronic cancer pain. One study in 1989 by Cathie E. Guzzetta involved randomly assigning eighty patients in a coronary care unit to either relaxation therapy, music therapy, or a control group in order to determine the effects of such therapies on indicators of stress. The relaxation and music therapy groups had significantly improved apical heart rates and peripheral temperatures compared with the control group.
Research in the visual arts also offers evidence of their impact on health outcomes, such as pain reduction and the need for less narcotic pain medication, reconstruction of a positive identity, reduced hospital stays, and fewer symptoms of physical and emotional distress. Stuckey and Nobel report, "Art helps people express experiences that are too difficult to put into words, such as a diagnosis of cancer ... integrating cancer into their life story and giving it meaning." Findings from one qualitative study conducted with women with cancer indicated four major ways in which engaging in different types of visual art aided in the healing process. Art helped them focus on positive life experiences versus an ongoing preoccupation with their illness. It also enhanced their self-worth and identity and the ability to maintain a social identity not defined by their illness, and it allowed them to express their feelings such as fear and grief in a symbolic manner. Another study, using a pretest-posttest, quasi-experimental design with multiple standardized instruments, tested the efficacy of a creative arts intervention with forty family caregivers of persons with cancer. Among those who took part in the program, stress and anxiety were significantly reduced.
The review of studies related to movement-based creative expression and expressive writing revealed similar results. People who have been able to express their feelings about their illness or traumatic experiences, through dance, journaling, poetry, and related art forms, exhibit improvements in measures of physical health, immune system functioning, pain, depressed mood, and other clinical outcomes. Findings from randomized, controlled studies indicate that the ability to express anger through writing helps people suffering from chronic pain and may improve the health of patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections as measured by lab results. The use of poetry helps people find their voice in ways that are not accessible using ordinary language. In summary, Stuckey and Nobel's review provides clear indications of the positive health benefits of engagement in these four types of artistic expression. As they maintain, arts in healing does not contradict but rather complements the biomedical view by focusing not only on sickness and symptoms but also on the holistic nature of individual persons. The image of a quilt, titled Where Words Fail ... Music Speaks, and its related story beautifully illustrate the nature of holistic health care.
Quilts and Health
Researchers are just beginning to focus systematic documentation specifically on health-related quilts and their stories in order to examine their association with measurable health outcomes and to apply their findings to health-care education and practice. Like Dunton, medical professionals and health-care providers who have closely observed the intersections of quiltmaking and quilt use among their patients provide many anecdotal accounts of the positive impact, but systematic studies are rare. In 1992 Carolyn H. Krone, a mental health nurse, and Thomas M. Horner, a university-based psychologist, observed from their professional work with bereaved persons that quiltmaking had a profound relationship to grief and mourning. Drawing upon stories they collected from a number of their clients, they categorized distinct ways in which quiltmaking could serve healing purposes, including working through painful loss, commemorating specific losses, linking quilters who share a common cause or concern, dealing with definable ranges of depression arising from loss, and providing an activity aimed toward completing quilts that others have begun but are unable to complete. They termed quiltmaking a form of indigenous healing and stated that quilt groups provide clinically significant pathways toward therapeutic healing. Limited as Krone and Horner's study was, it was a call for more attention to quiltmaking from researchers on health care and medical practices.
In 2009, nine decades after Dunton's pioneering publication on quilt history and the positive effect of quilts on his patients, J. O. Goh and Denise C. Park described one of the most systematic and rigorous studies to date to include quiltmaking specifically. They proposed a randomized, controlled intervention trial known as the Synapse Program, designed to evaluate the behavioral and neural impact of engagement in activities that facilitate successful cognitive function. Their work was based on the scaffolding theory of aging and cognition, which postulates that compensatory changes take place in the brain to alleviate cognitive decline associated with aging and that this neuroplasticity can be experience-dependent. The study design included an extensive cognitive, neuroimaging, and psychosocial battery of tests administered to subjects at baseline and again twelve weeks later in order to determine changes in cognitive function, brain structure, or patterns of neural recruitment. The intervention consisted of subjects being randomly assigned to one of six groups in which some of them would participate in "productive-engagement conditions," or continual learning of new and increasingly complex engagement tasks, and some in "receptive-engagement conditions." The groups included a quilting engagement group, digital photography group, and quilting/photography group (productive-engagement conditions), along with social control and placebo control groups (receptive-engagement conditions) and a no treatment control group. With the exception of the no treatment control group, subjects participated in their assigned activity fifteen hours a week or more for fourteen weeks. Quilting and photography were chosen because they are deeply engaging tasks that could appeal to a broad spectrum of older adults, were complex enough to require learning new skills, and were fun. The social control group participants engaged in social activities that did not require actively learning new skills, and the placebo control group engaged in regular non-challenging daily activities at home. In 2014 Park and her colleagues reported that 259 participants were enrolled in and completed the study. Analyses resulted in findings indicating that productive engagement resulted in a significant increase in episodic memory compared with receptive engagement. Participants in the photo and quilting/photography engagement group showed significant improvement in episodic memory, more so than those in the corresponding quilting/photography control group, although the latter group trended in a positive direction. The evidence indicates that memory function is improved by engagement in novel, cognitively demanding activities.
Other studies buttress these findings. Virginia Allen Dickie conducted an ethnographic study with women quilters in North Carolina and found that eight clusters of learning took place while the women quilted and that such learning contributed to meaning and well-being. She points out that with millions of quilters in the United States spending billions of dollars on quiltmaking, it is an occupation that is current, compelling, culturally relevant, and of economic interest. We contend that it should also be of serious interest to health-care providers as an easily accessible tool for holistic, person-centered physical and mental health practices. Two controlled studies are worth noting. First, Kurt D. Kausch and Kim Amer provided convincing preliminary data of the link between AIDS Memorial Quilt panel makers and self-transcendence that is associated with depression and an ability to cope with grief. In addition, through analyses of panel maker interviews, the researchers identified five themes. AIDS quilt panel making provides validation, creates a living memory, generates a community of survivors, establishes a connection to a higher power, and contributes to acceptance of loss. The second controlled study, by C. S. Knaus and E. W. Austin, demonstrated the power of the AIDS quilt to affect health in other ways. They surveyed college students who had or had not visited the AIDS Memorial Quilt and found that the visit not only changed the students' perceptions of people with AIDS but also contributed to important discussions that could lead to reduced risky behavior, an example of how quilts can be used as effective tools for public health education.
The field of occupational therapy continues to be ripe for the study of quilts and for quiltmaking as a restorative activity that can renew depleted energy and lead to improved mental and physical health. Dana Howell and Doris Pierce claim that restorative occupations such as sleep and other restful activities have been largely ignored, particularly in Western cultures that place a high value on productivity as central to self-identity and that "identify work with pay and play with children." In such a context, rest for adults is considered a waste of time that could be used more constructively. Howell and Pierce argue, as did Adolph Meyer, that rest is essential not only to good health but also to survival itself and should be included in any therapeutic goals. Further, it is important to go beyond false dichotomies of "work/life balance," which simplistically divide our lives into work and leisure, and shift to "a more three-dimensional description of occupational experience as simultaneously pleasurable, productive and restorative." There is a dynamic interplay between these three concepts within a wide range of occupations, including sleep and other restful endeavors, such as walking in the woods, reading a good book, and quiltmaking.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Quilts and Health"
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Copyright © 2017 Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Evidence of the Impact of Quilts and Quiltmaking on Health and Healthcare Outcomes
2. The Art of Health-related Quiltmaking
3. Individual Experiences of Health and Wellbeing through Quiltmaking
4. Public and Collective Quiltmaking for Health and Wellbeing
5. Quilts in Healing Environments and Clinical Care
6. Conclusion
Afterword
Appendix A: Guide to Whatever It Takes: An Ovarian Cancer Diary
Appendix B: Quilt Makers and Quilt Recipients
Bibliography
Index