Med School Takes Art Classes

When I was in college we were required to master the art of visual analysis. One by one, we would tackle the thorough description of an artwork as if attempting to make the blind visualize what we had in front of our eyes. After a few of these exercises, our professor explained how basic it was not only for art historians to be able to describe something with the right terminology, but for doctors as well. Doctors? Yeah, doctors.

The other day I was listening to a podcast by Artsy (highly recommend listening to these) where the topic of visual analysis in med school came up. A curator and a medical school professor at Columbia University sat down to talk about the institution’s implementation of art history courses in the med school curriculum.

These two are probably the most polar of fields, and nonetheless university professors have found that they complement each other.

An art history course can benefit a medicine student in various ways. For one, engaging in tasks like visual analyses of paintings can help future doctors recognize and make connections between the visual characteristics of a disease and what they behold in their patients. In the same way, mastering the act of describing what you see can prevent doctors from getting lost in the medical jargon that most patients don’t understand.

Other ways in which art history courses have benefited medicine students is through live drawing classes. Being able to look at the human body from a different perspective than the medical one can actually help students become more familiar to it and appreciate its beauty.

Overall, professors from top schools like Columbia and Harvard have noted that when students have the possibility of engaging with the arts, whether visual, music, or performance, they make connections faster between subjects and they enjoy the possibility of learning something that helps them look at people and life from a different angle. For medicine students, who are preparing to deal with disease and possibly death, having a well-rounded education that takes them out of the lab can be extremely beneficial.

So for all those who discredited art as being necessary for life, this proves you wrong!

You can learn more about Harvard's art courses for medical students here!

#arthistory #medicine #nude