Daisy Fancourt
The epidemiologist whose Art Cure makes the empirical case that engagement with the arts is a pillar of health.
Daisy Fancourt is Professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London and director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Arts and Health. Her book Art Cure (2025) synthesises some thirty thousand empirical studies into a single claim.
What the Wiki Takes From Fancourt
Where the wiki's other sources argue for beauty on aesthetic and philosophical grounds, Fancourt argues for it on epidemiological ones: that sustained engagement with the arts measurably lowers the incidence of depression and dementia, lowers blood pressure, and slows biological ageing. The wiki treats her work as the empirical foundation of its preface — the same claim that Scruton and Dariaux make from the side of value, restated in the language of incidence and adjusted hazard. The two arguments meet in the middle.