Art and medicine have worked hand in hand for a long time. To improve his art, Leonardo dissected bodies. To improve his anatomy treatise, Andreas Vesalius relied on the artistry of Titian’s workshop.
But the other day, in the European paintings wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a group of seven would-be doctors had a different kind of reason to appreciate a 17th-century Dutch scene before them: course credit. Three years ago, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine began an art appreciation course for medical students, joining a growing number of medical schools that are adding humanities to the usual forced march of physiology, pathology, and microbiology.
This year, for the first time, the course is required for third-year students, providing them not only with a blinking-into-the-sun break from medical rotations but also, said Dr. David Muller, the school’s chairman of medical education, a lesson about how important, and underrated, the art of looking is to the practice of medicine. “To make a better doctor means to me one who sees the person and not just the patient,” he said.
One study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2001, has found that looking at painting and sculpture can improve medical students’ observational abilities.
It could also, wrote Dr. Irwin Braverman, a Yale medical professor and an author of the study, eventually reduce health-care costs. “With heightened observational skills,” he wrote, “physicians can often ask the questions necessary to make correct diagnoses without relying too much on costly blood tests and X-rays.”
Rebecca Hirschwerk, an art educator who is the course’s instructor and one of its creators along with Dr. Muller, began to think about how, in listening and poring over charts, doctors sometimes had little time actually to look at their patients, especially under the pressures of today’s managed medical care.
“I can’t think of many places outside art where you can be in a moment, and just look, for as long as you can take it,” she said. “Think about what it would be like if you were with a patient and could freeze the moment to really pay attention to everything that patient was trying to tell you. It’s hard to do when you have only 15 minutes with patients, 20 times a day.”
On one particular museum visit, Ms. Hirschwerk asked the students to study The Proposal by the 19th-century French painter Adolphe-William Bouguereau for several minutes and then to turn away from it and recall the painting’s details, which they did in great detail, from the cat sitting at the woman’s feet to the almost invisible strand of thread stretched between her fingers.
Dr. Muller said that students were not graded in the class, in part to give them a break from their academic grind, and so it was hard to tell whether their it appreciation was improving their diagnostic skills. But in anonymous journal entries from previous classes, the students, who take the course during their geriatric rotation, making home visits to elderly patients-seem to pay closer, and more empathetic, attention to their patients.
Partly intended to make better doctors by making better-rounded human beings, such art courses are being joined by other, mostly elective humanities courses-and in some medical schools, whole humanities departments-that bring playwrights, poets, actors, philosophers, and other imports from the liberal arts into the world of medicine.
hand in hand: closely associated
wing: a section of a building connected to the main part
rotations: work shifts
underrated: underestimated in value or importance
strand: a single thin length grind: excessively hard work
anonymous: written by people who would like their names to be kept secret
empathetic: understanding of people’s feelings
Respond to the reading by answering the following questions.
1. What conclusions were made in the 2001 Journal of the American Medical Association?
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2. How can the study of art lower the cost of health care?
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3. According to Ms. Hirschwerk, what experience happens in an art museum that might be successfully transferred to a doctor/patient interaction?
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4. What finally confirmed Dr. Muller’s beliefs about the value of the art classes?
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5. What are some of the other humanities courses that have become part of some medical school curricula?
