Exploring the intersection of health and the arts for the Financial Times, 3 March 2026

As if his careers in politics, philosophy, engineering and the army were not enough, Benjamin Franklin also found time to invent the armonica. Thirty-seven glass bowls of different sizes, arranged along an iron spindle and turned by a foot pedal, produced a quavering sound, much like you make when you run a wetted finger around a wine glass. When Princess Izabela of Poland had a nervous breakdown in London, and started composing teary lines of farewell to friends and family, Franklin nipped round with his armonica to cheer her up. “Madam” he announced, when he was done, “you are cured.” And up she leapt, her melancholy quite dispelled.

In the 250-odd years between then and now, germ theory, pharmaceuticals and public health measures have improved public health and roughly doubled the human lifespan. Our poor gellid brains now have twice as many opportunities to go wrong. Alongside depression (or melancholy, or ennui, or whatever you want to call it) a host of new conditions has emerged. Many set in late in life, and have to do with wear and tear. In the UK, more than one in ten of us now die with dementia, and drugs alone cannot deal with the spectre of neurological decline.

Who would have thought that at the end of our long road of medical progress, we would find Benjamin Franklin waiting for us, poised over his armonica? And yet, at a Tefaf summit on culture and public policy on March 16, a panel of experts will pay unconscious homage to Franklin as they set out what the arts can do to delay, soothe and manage our physical and mental decline.

In her recent book Art Cure, as well as telling us about Benjamin Franklin, Daisy Fancourt traces the history of the relationship between the arts, medicine and mental health.
The absence of the arts in healthcare is, Daisy reveals, a largely post-war phenomenon. To see how central the arts were to medicine in general, and mental healthcare in particular, we need only look back at the Victorian era, whose asylums were, contrary to cliché, hotbeds of humane innovation. Hospitals in Dumfries and Montrose employed artists and maintained studios for painting, sculpture, and woodcarving. Worcester City and County Lunatic Asylum employed Edward Elgar to compose dance sets specifically for its patients.  In Germany, the Illenau “Cure and Nursing Home” maintained a house choir, a marching band, and a chamber orchestra, hosted 140 performances a year, and published specially composed hymns for other asylums to use.

Fancourt, a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London, runs clinical trials to test the medical impact of the arts, and advises governments on how to integrate community support activities into their national health systems. In 2017 the World Health Organisation commissioned her to write an evidenced report on the arts and health. Published in 2019 and cowritten with her colleague Saoirse Finn, it ended up being downloaded a quarter of a million times, says Fancourt, “and this led to the realisation that this is not a niche thing.” The WHO’s forthcoming technical reports and resolution are milestones in the effort to get the arts back into healthcare. Fancourt, UNESCO’s first-ever Chair in Arts and Global Health, is appearing at the Tefaf summit in Maastricht and, through her keynote speech, to talk up a new era of arts-based complementary healthcare.

She can expect some push-back. “If you’ve trained for seven years to be a doctor,” says Giles Wilmore, Director of Community for the chamber orchestra Manchester Camerata, “you don’t necessarily want to be told that somebody with a box of percussion instruments can achieve just as much as you can.”

But with a long career in the Department of Health and the NHS at his back, Wilmore reckons that the clinical case for therapeutic arts is as compelling as the economic one. (Social prescribing alone brings a return on arts investment of between £2 and £9 for every £1 invested, mostly by lowering demand on GPs and the pharmaceutical system. Arts interventions are uniquely cost-effective because they provide multiple health benefits simultaneously.

Now Wilmore is transforming the Camerata’s musical work with people who live with dementia into something like a national movement. Camerata is training hundreds of volunteers, and providing the know-how for any city in the UK to replicate its care work using the same data-backed methods.

To see what the arts can do for people with dementia, one need only visit one of Camerata’s “music cafes”, where improvisational techniques are used to engage both clients and carers in activities they can lead themselves. Camerata CEO Bob Riley recalls one woman, brought along by her children, slumped and unresponsive, who had just come out of hospital. “We were told she had barely eaten, and hadn’t been out of bed for three weeks. The musician saw a gentle bouncing in her knee — a tiny thing, you almost wouldn’t have noticed it. The musician started mirroring that movement, and all of a sudden her head rises, she’s back in the room and her eyes are open. The flautist improvises on the shake in her knee — a tango-esque melody — and after five minutes she’s dancing around the room.”

This is touching, but what is art actually doing in these situations? Fancourt recalls, “We went through a phase where we had a lot of laboratory experiments on arts activities that tried to dissect which element of an artistic intervention was responsible for which therapeutic effect. But that was completely missing the point, which is that the arts offer the brain the equivalent of a whole-body workout.”

Fancourt is referring to art’s effects on the mesolimbic system, the neurochemical engine in the brain that keeps us engaged with the world by constantly testing our perceptions against our expectations.

Whenever there’s a mismatch between what we expect and what we get, dopamine is released, encouraging the formation of new neural pathways. Music exploits this phenomenon on an almost bar by bar basis, since when we listen to a new song, our brains are constantly trying to guess where the melody is going based on every other song we’ve ever heard. The trick is not to release dopamine into the brain any old how, rendering us all addicts to bovine pleasure, but to control the release of dopamine to promote its most therapeutic effects.

Art establishes some visual or auditory or narrative pattern and then violates it. When we see blue water lilies emerge from Claude Monet’s seemingly chaotic canvases, aesthetic pleasure arrives on a wavelet of dopamine. Art stimulates the release of dopamine in a measured and sustained manner that dopaminergic medicines cannot even begin to match. This is probably why artists often possess structurally “younger” brains, with greater grey matter density (thicker neural connections) than you would find in the brains of non-artists. It’s an effect that seems to resonate through the rest of the body. Adults who are active in the arts are biologically around 9.5 months younger than those who never engage.

More important, people with greater grey matter density, nurtured by arts involvement, may delay the onset of dementia symptoms by years. The arts’ effects on the mesolimbic system makes them particularly useful in the treatment of that other great neurological scourge of our times, Parkinson’s disease.

In the UK, partly due to an aging population and longer survival times, Parkinson’s is a serious and increasingly common contributory cause of death. Bas Bloem, professor of neurology at Radboud University in the Netherlands, argues that art acts as a “lever” that can help overcome the frozen, dopamine-depleted motor patterns associated with the disease. Right now he’s midway through a rigorously designed 18-month study comparing the experience of three groups of people with Parkinson’s: a control group who aren’t exposed to art, a group that get free trips to the galleries of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and a group who actively make art.

His results will be analysed closely. One of the more curious findings in the field recently has been the discovery that enjoying art as a punter is quite as therapeutic — and maybe even more therapeutic — than “doing” art. A large-scale study led by Monash University published in late 2025 followed over 10,000 older adults and found that those who regularly listened to music had a 39 per cent reduced risk of developing dementia. Surprisingly, those who played an instrument had a slightly lower (33 per cent) reduced risk.

Another study last year, using Wisconsin Longitudinal Study data, asked the question: “How much art is enough?” It turns out that engaging in arts activities for up to one hour a week yielded cognitive benefits comparable to vigorous physical exercise. As Fancourt says in her book, “I’m really not convinced that the arts are so much less enjoyable than eating broad beans or sweating in the gym.”

Fancourt advocates for a future that values the arts as much as it values sport — as a social institution that sustains public health even as it nurtures and celebrates elite excellence. “We manage to have leisure centres and climbing walls and indoor skiing, just for the fun of it. And at the same time we have exercise-on-referral programmes and we integrate exercise into clinical care. And while all that’s going on we have Olympic-level training programmes. I feel we can surely get to that same point with the arts.”