Looking at Art Could Help Med Students Become Better Doctors

For decades, humanities and arts classes have been offered to medical students, in attempts to help them maintain empathy and develop skills necessary to accurately diagnose their future patients. Known as “narrative medicine” courses, they’ve covered topics from comic book–making to modern dance to impressionist painting. Now, new research shows that looking at artworks can help future doctors hone their observation skills, maintain objectivity, and cope with moments of uncertainty. 

The study

Since 2005, New York–based artist Anna Willieme has been designing and teaching art courses for medical students and doctors (she’s also worked with students at NYU School of Medicine and residents at Massachusetts General Hospital). The new study, conducted by Columbia University School of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medical College, focused specifically on Willieme’s annual six-week course “Observation and Uncertainty in Art and Medicine,” and tracked the progress of 47 first-year med students who enrolled in it from 2014 to 2017. At the start and end of the course, students took tests to measure their reflective ability, tolerance for ambiguity, and personal bias awareness.

“I was always fascinated, as an artist, with the ways that art could help me observe more,” Willieme explained. Inspired by the “cultivation of observation that happens in art,” she’s developed several courses over the years that focus on perceptual skills and present the art museum as a laboratory.

“The goals here were to enhance their observation and self-awareness, and [their] capacity to have a certain sensibility in terms of point of view…[the] capacity to look out, look in, and look around,” Willieme said of her course featured in the study. In it, over the course of six weeks, students convened weekly for two hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Willieme guided them through a series of exercises that involved looking, sketching, and sharing their thoughts about specific works of art.

Each week had a different theme, such as point of view, emotion, and self-awareness. One exercise for understanding point of view had students sketching Constantin Brâncuși’s abstract sculpture Bird in Space (1923). Every two minutes, they got up and moved to the next person’s sketchbook, then continued.

“First of all, they’re discovering the complexity as they look at the piece a little longer, but as they are leaving their own sketchbooks for the next person to pick up, they also see how someone else has been seeing things,” Willieme explained. One student might have started with the base of the sleek, white piece, while another may have drawn something in the background; a third student might have realized they hadn’t noticed either of those things. The same concept can be applied to medical scenarios, such as examining a patient’s body or picking up on subtle cues from family members in an exam room.

Exercises like this finished with discussion. “A lot of the teaching happens at that time,” Willieme explained. Students not only spoke about their observations, but also debriefed on why they or their peers might have made a certain observation, or focused on a particular facet of the artwork. “We’re seeing, and then seeing why we’re seeing,” Willieme explained.

Often, students were led to identify their own biases—such as in an exercise where they were asked to look at Giorgio de Chirico’s Ariadne (1913), and then sketch the memories or associations that it triggered. “When we’re seeing something, it’s never neutral, it’s also filled with what we saw previously, our associations our inner world—all of this can come to the surface,” Willieme explained.