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Can Med Educ J
Can Med Educ J
CMEJ
Canadian Medical Education Journal
1923-1202
Canadian Medical Education Journal

CMEJ-15-142
10.36834/cmej.79296
Letters to the Editor
The art of Robert Pope
L’art de Robert PopeShankar P Ravi 1
1 IMU Centre for Education, IMU University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Correspondence to: P Ravi Shankar; email: ravi.dr.shankar@gmail.com
22 5 2024
30 8 2024
8 2024
15 4 142142
© 2024 Shankar; licensee Synergies Partners.
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This is an Open Journal Systems article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is cited.
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pmcDear Editor

I read with great interest the opinion article titled ‘Humanism in Canadian medicine: from the Rockies to the Atlantic.’1 Canada is strong in the medical humanities with several decades of experience in the discipline. I had initiated a medical humanities project in Nepal as part of an educational fellowship offered by the PSGFAIMER Regional Institute in Coimbatore, India. The module was later offered in the Caribbean, India, and Malaysia.2

My fellow facilitators and I extensively used the artwork by the Canadian artist, Robert Pope during our medical humanities sessions in Nepal, the Caribbean, and India. Pope’s work is not limited by culture and appeals to learners in different locations. His paintings titled Chemotherapy, Hug, Visitors, Mother and Son, and Mountain were used by us during our modules (Figure 1).3 I have also used these paintings during the workshops I conduct for faculty members and students both online and onsite. Several of his works explore the world from the perspective of a patient lying on a bed.

Figure 1 Robert Pope. Visitors, acrylic on canvas, 1989. Permission of the Robert Pope Foundation.

Dr Jock Murray who had run medical humanities modules at Dalhousie University, reviewed Pope’s work and he mentions about the layered realism in Pope’s paintings4 and how the artist referred to his paintings as ‘parables of contemporary life’. His paintings have multiple layers of meaning appreciated by our participants. Robert Pope is an important artist whose work can be used to explore different aspects of healing and illness, especially cancer.

Edited by

Marcel D’Eon (editor-in-chief)
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1 Huang RS, Kam A. Humanism in Canadian medicine: from the Rockies to the Atlantic. Can Med Ed J. 2024;15 (2 ): 97-98. 10.36834/cmej.78391.
2 Shankar PR. Medical humanities: developing into a mainstream discipline. J Educ Eval Health Prof. 2014;11 :32. 10.3352/jeehp.2014.11.32 25417866
3 Robert Pope Archive. Illness and Healing. In Robert Pope Archive. Illness and healing. Available from https://robertpopearchive.com/illness-and-healing/ [Accessed on May 22, 2024].
4 Murray J. Illness and healing: the art of Robert Pope. Human Med. 1994;10 (3 ): 199-208.
