Caring Hands
The Healing Power
of Quilts & Quiltmaking
A Quilt is a Hug
“When my young child died, I felt as if the world had come apart. Nothing anyone said could make the loss bearable. Then several women from my church came to my home and brought me a quilt they had made. Each had contributed a piece of fabric and sewn prayers, memories, and love into its pattern. The quilt did not cure my grief or take away the terrible absence, but when I wrapped it around myself, I felt held—not only by the fabric, but by my community. It gave warmth to my body, comfort to my spirit, and a quiet assurance that I did not have to grieve alone. A quilt is a hug."
With No One Left Behind
“Name an illness, medical condition, or disease and you will find quiltmaking associated with it. From Alzheimer’s to Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Lou Gehrig’s Disease to Crigler-Najjar Syndrome, and for nearly every form of cancer, millions of quilts have been made in support of personal well-being, health education, patient advocacy, memorialization of victims, and fundraising.”
Publishers Description of Quilts and Health
Quilts and Health
"In Quilts and Health (Indiana University Press, 2017), Marsha MacDowell and her colleagues examine the phenomenon of health-related quilts, of which there are millions around the world. In fact, and as this book documents, almost any illness, disease, or condition is likely to be associated in some way with quiltmaking.
Quilts are made to support health education and patient advocacy, to raise funds, to memorialize those passed, to promote personal well-being, and to comfort others in distress. Some quilts even document medical history; for example, Ohio-based quilter Helen Murrell created a piece that serves as a statement of outrage for the unjust treatment of 600 African-American men who, without their knowledge or consent, were subjected to a forty-year medical experiment of the United States government. During the experiment, 399 men were deliberately infected with syphilis and were allowed to go untreated, even after a cure was developed.
Quilts and Health explores the myriad connections that are forged between disease, recovery, and quilt making. As the authors note, systematic study of quilts and the stories they hold has “great potential to help us understand the human experience for illness and health, advance medical knowledge, and, ultimately, enhance the quality of health, outcomes, and life”. McDowell’s co-writers are Clare Luz and Beth Donaldson, both of whom are also based at Michigan State University. Luz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Orthopedic Medicine. Donaldson is Digital Humanities Project Asset Coordinator at the Museum and Coordinator of the Museum’s Quilt Index."
Table of Contents
Quilts are made to support health education and patient advocacy, to raise funds, to memorialize those passed, to promote personal well-being, and to comfort others in distress. Some quilts even document medical history; for example, Ohio-based quilter Helen Murrell created a piece that serves as a statement of outrage for the unjust treatment of 600 African-American men who, without their knowledge or consent, were subjected to a forty-year medical experiment of the United States government. During the experiment, 399 men were deliberately infected with syphilis and were allowed to go untreated, even after a cure was developed.
Quilts and Health explores the myriad connections that are forged between disease, recovery, and quilt making. As the authors note, systematic study of quilts and the stories they hold has “great potential to help us understand the human experience for illness and health, advance medical knowledge, and, ultimately, enhance the quality of health, outcomes, and life”. McDowell’s co-writers are Clare Luz and Beth Donaldson, both of whom are also based at Michigan State University. Luz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Orthopedic Medicine. Donaldson is Digital Humanities Project Asset Coordinator at the Museum and Coordinator of the Museum’s Quilt Index."
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Evidence of the Impact of Quilts and Quiltmaking on Health and Healthcare Outcomes
- The Art of Health-Related Quiltmaking
- Individual Experiences of Health and Wellbeing through Quiltmaking
- Public and Collective Quiltmaking for Health and Wellbeing
- Quilts in Healing Environments and Clinical Care
- Conclusion
- Afterword
- Appendix A: Guide to Whatever It Takes: An Ovarian Cancer Diary
- Appendix B: Quilt Makers and Quilt Recipients
- Bibliography
- Index
A Process Theology of
Health-Related Quilt-Making
- God as the Spirit of Creative Transformation: John Cobb understands God as a creative and transforming presence at work in the world and in human life. Quiltmaking participates in this transformation by bringing separate—and sometimes discarded—pieces into a new and beautiful whole. As a healing art, it suggests that wounded or fragmented lives can also be creatively transformed, even when the wounds themselves cannot be erased.
- God as the Fellow Sufferer Who Understands: Whitehead describes God as “the fellow-sufferer who understands.” God does not remain distant from pain but receives every sorrow into the divine life with tenderness and understanding. A quilt made for someone who is grieving can embody this compassionate presence: it cannot remove the loss, but it can accompany the person who suffers, offering the assurance that sorrow is seen, shared, and held.
- God as Healing Love: Process theology understands divine love as all-pervasive but not all-controlling. God heals through persuasion, companionship, fresh possibilities, and the loving actions of people who cooperate with the divine presence. Making and giving a quilt can become one such act of cooperation—a way of allowing healing love to take material form through fabric, warmth, beauty, and human care.
- The “Withness of the Body”: Whitehead emphasizes that experience is always embodied; even our most inward feelings carry what he calls the “withness of the body.” Quiltmaking engages the hands, eyes, senses, emotions, memories, and imagination. Its physical rhythms can be calming and centering, while the finished quilt offers bodily warmth, comfort, security, and the tangible feeling of being held.
- The Aesthetic Character of Experience: Process thought recognizes beauty, pattern, color, texture, contrast, and harmony as fundamental dimensions of life. Quiltmaking brings these dimensions together in a tangible form, arranging diverse elements into a composition without eliminating their differences. The experience of creating, touching, or receiving beauty can nourish the spirit, awaken hope, and restore a sense that life still contains possibilities for delight.
- Relational Power: Process theology emphasizes a form of power that works through cooperation, participation, mutual influence, and shared creativity rather than domination or control. Quilts are often made collaboratively, with different people contributing fabric, labor, memories, prayers, or ideas for the design. Quiltmaking can therefore strengthen relationships, and those relationships can themselves become sources of healing.
- Beauty as the Telos of the Universe: Process thought sees beauty as a fundamental aim of life—a beauty that includes contrast, complexity, imperfection, and even tragedy. Quilts can incorporate pieces associated with loss, suffering, or difficult memories, placing them within a larger pattern without denying what those pieces represent. In this way, quilts can create tragic beauty: a beauty that does not cancel sorrow but carries it within a wider harmony.
- Healing as Distinct from Curing: Curing seeks to remove disease or restore physical health, while healing may occur even when a cure is impossible. Making or receiving a quilt may not cure an illness, reverse a disability, or bring back someone who has died, but it can offer peace, dignity, consolation, courage, and a renewed sense of being cared for. Healing may mean becoming more whole within circumstances that cannot be changed.
- Healing through Connection: Healing involves mind, body, and spirit, together with a renewed sense of connection—with oneself, with other people, with the natural world, and with the sacred. A quilt can embody these relationships through its fabrics, colors, symbols, stories, and the hands that stitched it. It can remind its recipient: “You belong to a larger community, and you do not face this alone.”
- Quiltmaking as a Spiritual Practice: The patient acts of selecting, cutting, arranging, stitching, and mending can become forms of contemplation. They invite attentiveness, patience, creativity, and openness to unexpected possibilities. Like prayer or meditation, quiltmaking can quiet the mind while giving the hands meaningful work; in this way, it can help heal the maker as well as the recipient.
- The Quilt as a Gift of Presence: A quilt is not simply a useful object or a work of art. When made and given with care, it becomes a tangible expression of human and divine companionship. It says, without needing words, “You are remembered. You are loved. You are held. You are not alone.”
The Quilt Index
"The Quilt Index is an open access, digital repository of thousands of images, stories and information about quilts and their makers drawn from hundreds of public and private collections around the world. The Quilt Index is a digital humanities research and education project of the Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University." Click here.