January 29, 2009
Art enhances medicine: Learning to look more closely
Twenty-somethings in a huddle peer closely at mural-size photos in the Henry Art Gallery and then, two weeks later, at intricate 19th century illustrations of Egyptian flora and fauna at the Frye Art Museum. They avidly discuss their observations with each other.
Art history students? Curators? Scholars?
Guess again…they’re first- and second year medical students at the UW School of Medicine. They are scrutinizing art in order to become better doctors as part of an innovative class in medical diagnosis called Visual Thinking: How to Observe in Depth.
“It’s about making observations,” explains co-instructor Tamara Moats, former curator of education at the Henry Art Gallery and adjunct faculty in art history at the UW Museology Program. “It’s irrelevant that they’re looking at art — what they’re gaining is the ability to really look at something, and that is a skill that is perfectly adaptable to medical diagnosis.”
Moats, along with Andrea Kalus, a professor of dermatology at the UW, taught the elective course last semester. It emphasizes the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method of looking deeply at original works of art, a technique that expands observational and critical thinking skills and encourages open-ended observations to problematic situations similar to those found in medicine.
Moats intentionally tells the students nothing in advance about the art they will be seeing: nothing about its historical period, the artist’s materials or intentions. This absence of context forces the students to analyze visual information without bias, a valuable skill for future physicians.
Similarly, Kalus shows students images slides of mysterious skin ailments without any background information. She encourages them to take their time, to make visual observations and ask pertinent questions about what they are seeing, rather than trying to guess the correct diagnosis as quickly as possible.
At the Frye Art Museum in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood, Moats urges, “You medical students, as scientists, should learn to draw what you see. Not how to draw — that implies more training — but how to look even more closely, and repeatedly. This a kinesthetic version of Visual Thinking, and the act of drawing challenges you to learn even more deeply about the subject.” To this end, the med students spent one class drawing in the Frye with vibrantly colored pencils. “Leonardo knew the value of drawing, and basically invented scientific illustration for this purpose during the Renaissance.”
Following in the footsteps of similar innovative courses offered at the Yale School of Medicine and the Harvard School of Medicine, Visual Thinking: How to Observe in Depth teaches students new ways of assessing patients with a broad range of disorders.
Visual Thinking Strategies is a trademarked museum education method developed by psychologist Abigail Housen and former Museum of Modern Art Director of Education Philip Yenawine. Looking at and analyzing art is considered particularly useful to the medical disciplines, as the practice of medicine similarly demands the ability to work with complex and often ambiguous visual information, emphasizes visual recognition as an important source of information, and develops collaboration with peers in both diagnosis and treatment.
