Art Cure by Daisy Fancourt review – is culture the best medicine?

A professor of psychobiology argues that art – from painting to theatre – has a measurable impact on our health

After Daisy Fancourt’s daughter Daphne was born prematurely, she was confined to an incubator, fighting for her life against a series of infections. Unable to touch her baby or even properly enter the room, Fancourt kept vigil just inside the door, dressed head to toe in PPE, singing lullabies over the whir of instruments and alarms. The songs calmed her, and may have been crucial for Daphne too. Studies show that singing to babies in intensive care reduces their heart rate, improves their breathing, and encourages them to feed.

It was a moment when Fancourt’s professional and personal lives collided. A professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London, she researches how social connections and behaviours affect our health. In Art Cure, her first book for a popular audience, she aims to make a scientific case that the arts – from playing music to theatre-going to painting – aren’t a merely aesthetic aspect of life. Instead, they are deeply entwined with our mental and physical wellbeing at every level – from the workings of our cells and molecules to cognition, memory and mood. In an era of shrinking arts funding and overstretched healthcare systems, her message is urgent. But how to compile rigorous evidence for something as holistic, indefinable – and, perhaps, resolutely unscientific – as art?

Fancourt’s answer is to dissect artistic interventions and practices into their component parts. She argues that every arts experience can be broken down into “active ingredients”; could even – if we had the processing power – be converted into binary code. Singing to sick babies becomes a mix of noise buffering, neurological stimulation, human contact and stress reduction. These ingredients trigger biological mechanisms that lead to health outcomes, she explains, and we can test, refine and prescribe them just as we might any cocktail of drugs. With this approach in mind, she surveys the evidence for medical benefits, from wellbeing to brain health, chronic pain and even how long we live.

Fancourt avoids any suggestion of miracle cures: she debunks a claim that exposure to classical music kills cancer cells. But she shows that creative engagement, offered alongside conventional treatment, can have significant effects: reducing stress and pain, improving balance and coordination in Parkinson’s disease; helping patients on ventilators to breathe on their own. Different practices work through different pathways, from boosting self-esteem to triggering gene expression. By stimulating the vagus nerve, for example, art reaches the heart, facial muscles and gut, working simultaneously “as a form of beta blocker, Botox and antispasmodic”.

Human stories illustrate the trial results. We meet a depressed mother whose life turns around when she picks up a leaflet for an “art for wellbeing” class; and a 94-year-old with dementia, briefly transformed by a recording of Singin’ in the Rain into his former animated, lucid self. The key in each case, says Fancourt, is broadening the medical focus from “What’s the matter with them?” to “What matters to them”.

The case for regular arts engagement is economic as well as clinical: the improvements in wellbeing are worth a £1,500 pay rise; delaying the onset of dementia could save the NHS and social care £1.5bn a year. Yet despite this, we’re increasingly treating art as expendable. In 2022, arts funding in UK schools was just £9.40 per pupil per year; in 2021, government funding for creative degrees was halved. When adults in the US were asked how many minutes they spent engaging in the arts the day before, the most popular answer (given by 95% of people) was zero. “We’re lapsing into a state of artistic passivity,” says Fancourt. She calls for a “seatbelt moment”, a collective recognition that arts deprivation carries major consequences for public health.

The book prompts some uneasy questions. Art is not a set of fixed ingredients administered from outside, but an open-ended interaction, experienced differently by every person who encounters it and with a power that transcends the sum of its parts. Do we lose something when we treat art as a means rather than an end – assessing its value through physical mechanisms and countable outcomes? And what does it mean for society that we have to justify it in this way?

Art Cure cannot provide answers. But it does make a compelling, compassionate case for broadening how we think about medicine – to encompass people and communities, not just physical bodies, and to recognise that creativity, identity and purpose shape our biology as much as any drug.

• Jo Marchant is author of Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body (Canongate, £10.99). Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health by Daisy Fancourt is published by Cornerstone (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.