Health Literary and the Arts: Exploring the Intersection.

Historically, study and implementation of health literacy mostly focused on text-based information with frequent attention to medical and health related content within an increasingly complex healthcare system. This chapter introduces visual literacy, particularly as it relates to the visual arts, as a potentially understudied and underutilized component of health literacy that might offer benefit to both patients and healthcare workers. Literacy is both content and context specific. We posit that interaction with the arts improves the ability to appreciate the context inherent within communication across cultures and belief systems.