Jonathan Palmer Fee is a third-year medical student at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine.
In the following blog post, he reflects on how his personal journey with music and years of playing for patients in hospitals, hospices, and shelters has informed his future vision where musical medicine becomes a staple of compassionate care.
“I believe we don’t just need more music in medicine, but an altogether musical medicine—one in which clinicians can easily arrange for musical experiences to benefit any patient.“
The Musical Brain Initiative
“What has this meant to me? Everything. I am a musical person; this has been the best thing in the three weeks I’ve been at this hospital because I love music. It’s in my heart and my soul. Please never quit. I’m in my glory. Thank you.”
These were the words of a Shepardson 3 North patient after the Musical Brain Initiative made its monthly visit to the floor in July. I started the Musical Brain Initiative (MBI) last year through Larner’s Center on Aging with the mission of bringing medical student musicians and patients together to benefit from the uplifting and unifying power of live music. We have received comments of this nature after every visit.
First launched as a personal project through the Center on Aging’s Student Advisory Board, MBI has grown into a thriving group with more than 20 participating members and a defined leadership structure. Each class year has a general director to conduct operations and advance the mission of the group (myself ’27, Emily Hovan ’28) and a music director to assist with musical selection, arrangement, and performance (Ryan Marawala ’27, Ryan Cheng ’28). We partner with the Shepardson 3N floor—a long term care unit in which some patients undergo prolonged stays while awaiting discharge—where Activities Director Ashley Snow has integrated our visits into a vibrant patient enrichment program. Members have also visited the nearby Hope Lodge, Ethan Allen Residence, and individual patients by request.
The driving force behind MBI is the strongly held belief that medicine should be, above all else, a humanistic endeavor. As healers and leaders in health care, our responsibilities extend beyond the preservation of life. In a place like a hospital, where lives, abilities, and identities are lost or transformed every day and struggling souls are asked to accommodate existential burdens, we are also obliged to reinforce the dignity and humanity of those in our care. As Edward Livingston Trudeau said: “Cure sometimes, relieve often, comfort always.” For me, the most reliable way to do this is with music. When two people share the joy of a song, the roles they carry—doctor vs. patient, healthy vs. sick, knowledgeable vs. vulnerable—melt away, revealing a shared humanity that can serve as the foundation for a genuine relationship and the start of true healing.
Playing and Singing from Hospice to Hospital Halls
I began teaching myself to play guitar and sing when I was 16. Albums like Amos Lee’s Mission Bell and Ray Lamontagne’s Trouble helped me face the challenges in my life; they taught me to process loss by embracing vulnerability and made me feel whole. At the same time, books like Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia opened my eyes to the innate musicality of the human brain and the many ways music can be harnessed to help ourselves and others. In college, I quickly joined a music service group and began my now decade-long journey of playing in health care facilities and shelters.
As a hospice volunteer, patients transformed before my eyes with the right song. For Bill, it was B. B. King. The pain of metastatic osteosarcoma would fall from his face and he would share stories of his upbringing in the deep South, sprinkling charming idioms throughout and laughing gently, his late wife appearing as a sparkle in his eyes, sometimes dancing through in tears. He liked to hold my hand. For Lilian, who was incapacitated by advanced dementia, it was the “Tennessee Waltz” by Patti Page. Her arm, otherwise immobilized at her side, would stretch, quivering, to her husband’s black-and-white portrait. She would hold it before her and stare. In the following silence, the mask would slowly descend again, but for her daughter, every glimpse of the mother she knew was like coming up for air.
These friends of mine have now passed, but their impact lives on within me as a fervent dedication to making music more available in hospital settings—especially to patients with conditions involving the brain or nervous system that tend to be highly responsive to musical intervention. I believe we don’t just need more music in medicine, but an altogether musical medicine—one in which clinicians can easily arrange for musical experiences to benefit any patient, whether with a licensed music therapist using targeted exposures to achieve specific clinical goals, a group of medical students singing classic love songs to build rapport and improve general well-being, or a soft, familiar melody by the bedside of someone coming to terms with the end. In this medicine, patients would feel seen not as a battleground for pharmacological and physiological combat, nor as an itemized bill to be negotiated, but as a living being to be tended to—mind, body, and soul.
Looking to the Future
This summer, I had the enormous honor of receiving the Joseph Collins Scholarship, a generous award meant to support a medical student incorporating humanities, especially the fine arts, into medicine. Together with the support of the Center on Aging, multiple faculty members, board-certified music therapists Maggie Connors and Danica Cunningham, our student leadership team, and our most regular participants (including Aiden Masters ’ 27, Serena Verma ’ 27, Clara Goebel ’ 27, Eli Howe ’ 28, and Keiran Kozlowksi ’ 28), I have never been more optimistic about the future of musical medicine here at UVM. Our aims are high as we explore ways of making visits and activities available to a broader array of patients, such as those in the movement disorder community and rehabilitation settings, and continue to seek engagement from the incoming Class of 2029.
As for me, my professional interests lie at the intersection of the arts with the neuroanatomical sciences, physical function, and mental health. I gravitate organically toward patient populations treated by physiatrists, neurologists, and psychiatrists, and find myself naturally building lasting patient relationships with an eye toward maximizing quality of life. As I progress through clinical rotations with an open mind, there’s one thing I’m sure of: I’ll be singing with my patients until I can’t hold a guitar anymore.
“Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.“
— Hippocrates
On this day, Musical Brain Initiative musicians were videotaped by Janet Essman Franz, to document the Musical Brain Initiative project.
View video as full screen (captioned)