The Schubert Treatment: A Story of Music and Healing

Oppert, a classical cellist and art therapist, debuts with a luminous ode to the “mysterious ways music... moves” patients with such conditions as dementia and autism. The author, who inherited a love of music from her doctor father, took up the cello at eight and “fell for the instrument as violently and suddenly as a lightning strike.” Following the first concert she ever played, at age 14, a listener told her, “If you were a doctor, you would have healed me.” After being trained as an art therapist, Oppert played a Schubert andante in a dementia ward as a “spontaneous experiment” and found that the music relaxed patients. That experience set the stage for what came to be known as the “Schubert treatment,” in which live music serves as “sensory counter-stimulation” during painful procedures, decreasing patient pain and anxiety, and improving caregivers’ moods. In a narrative interwoven with evocative vignettes of patient experiences (“For a few moments, there is no pain. She can’t say it in words, but her entire body announces it”), Oppert gracefully conveys both the power and mystery of music’s ability to serve as “a bulwark against absurdity, disease, and death, to try to reach the thing that lies beneath.” Assured and lyrical, this impresses. (Oct.)