Medicine and music taught us to go in one direction probably. Music as a cure for the soul dates back to the ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato. We are used to following more and more schools of thought maintaining that music has the potential to heal, moreover being the patient a musician.
Recently the young Spanish musician Carlos Aguilera had to undergo a brain surgery that produced quite a sensation. Indeed Aguilera, 27 years old, played his own saxophone during the whole operation, carried out for 12 hours at the Malaga’s regional hospital. Keeping himself awake, while surgeons were working on his brain tumor, allowed Aguilera to not lose consciousness and moreover to not lose the ability that has always marked his life: playing music.
12 hours non-stop of sax riffs for the young artist, whom after the successful surgery described himself as reborn, only months after the big fear for his disease.
Despite Europe experienced such a method for the first time ever, in the United States this is a long established practice, as reported on NPR’s Shots recent story The Neuroscience Of Musical Perception, Bass Guitars And Drake.
A Slovenian Soprano, Ambroz Bajec, was instead asked to sing some fragments of Franz Schubert’s Gute Nacht. In August, Bajec-Lapajne posted a video of his performance in the operating theater. “All is fine until min. 2:40 when things start to get very interesting,” Bajec-Lapajne said about the video. “It’s been more than a year since and I’m doing fine, continuing my professional singing career.”
Other recent incredible cases include:
- In June guitarist Kulkamp Anthony Dias played the Beatles’ Yesterday and other songs during a surgery to remove a tumor in Brazil;
- last year, former Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra violinist Naomi Elishuv played during a procedure in Tel Aviv to correct tremors that ended her career;
- Again in 2014 American concert violinist Roger Frisch underwent a procedure similar to Elishuv’s to free him from essential tremors;
- in 2008, bluegrass legend Eddie Adcock played banjo during neurosurgery to correct similar involuntary tremors.
Therefore a new challenge is emerging in the field of medicine, that combined with art, especially music, may mark a new stage for the cure of the soul… and maybe more.
[Featured image by Flickr user]
