Associate Professor of Physician Assistant Studies Antoinette Polito highlights the intersection between dance and disease in the medieval era, with a special nod to David Bowie.
With over 25 years of experience as a physician assistant, Associate Professor of Physician Assistant Studies Antoinette Polito still has a great appreciation for the field of humanities.
“I’m a huge reader. I’m always thinking about art, literature and things like that,” Polito explained. “I bring that into medicine because I think when you teach people how to take care of others in a medical way, you’re basically teaching them how to take care of other people as humans. You need a way to connect.”
Polito studied political science, gender studies and English throughout her undergraduate experience. She transitioned into joining the Duke University PA program and continued her clinical experience there with cancer patients. After 10 years, she became an educator at Duke in 2009 and she joined Elon in July 2017.
Polito regularly implements aspects from her work in humanities into her teachings of medicine. She views it as vital to understanding people, and more specifically, patients.
“I’m that person that always wants to bring a poem to class and have the students discuss it, or watch a movie about medicine and discuss it,” said Polito. “It was natural then for me to want to learn more about medical humanities.”
It was last year that Polito began experimenting with medical research and humanities writing, which led to her paper, “The Holy Roman Hausfrau Inspired a Fairy Tale and the Rest is History: The Exploration of Disease and Dance with a Nod to David Bowie.” She presented her work at the International Conference on Medical Humanities in early March.
The paper discusses a story from medieval France about a woman who danced in the center of her village for hours one summer, falling from exhaustion and hunger. Eventually, locals began to join her, and many medical accounts explained that there were multiple fatalities by the end of the summer.
“Dozens of people are dancing, their feet are bleeding, people are having seizures, but they wouldn’t stop. The medicine part of me is wondering, ‘Well, why did that happen?’, while the part of me that is interested in the cultural aspects looked at, ‘How did they finally stop the dancing?’”
The story concludes that the dancers were brought to a shrine for the patron saint of dancing, Saint Vitus, to cure them of a supposed curse. Contemporary accounts claim that the dancers wore red shoes anointed with holy water, and eventually stopped dancing.
She decided to connect it to something more modern, and discussed the Danish fable by Hans Christian Anderson, “Red Shoes.” This story follows a young girl in red shoes that were deemed scandalous by locals in her town. The contempt inevitably sparked her to begin dancing, and she also was unable to stop. She pleaded with the local executioner to cut off her feet, and the red shoes, with nobody attached to them, danced away into the woods.
“I wanted to make a nod to David Bowie since he wrote a song with that line, ‘Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues,’” Polito explained. “He wasn’t talking about the red shoes in the same way, but I knew I was going to England and I thought it would be cool to tie that in. It was just a way to connect medieval Europe, to 19th century Europe, to now.”
Since presenting on medical humanities research, Polito has been able to find a niche community.
“The questions people asked me were so different than what my colleagues might ask me,” Polito said. “Someone might ask me ‘How do you read this line in the fairy tale? What do you make of that more literary critique?’ They’re just really interesting people.”