Aspiring doctors may not think they have time
to gaze at paintings or play the viola while they’re cramming for anatomy tests. But Harvard Medical School thinks students should be doing more of that — and the school is not alone.
This fall, Harvard launched a new initiative to use more drama, dance, and literature to help medical students become empathetic and reflective doctors. In doing so, Harvard joins a growing number of schools making more overt efforts to weave arts and humanities into medical education.
The Yale School of Medicine, for instance, requires students to scrutinize paintings in a museum to improve their skills at observation and empathy — a program that has been replicated around the country, including at Harvard and Brown. At Columbia, incoming medical students are required to complete a six-week narrative medicine course. They can take classes in fiction writing, obituary writing, and visual art. At Penn State College of Medicine, the first medical school in the country to create its own humanities department, students can take a comics and medicine course to fulfill a required humanities elective.
These kinds of programs are now spreading to more medical schools.
“There is, on a national level, increasing support for this kind of activity, ” said Dr. John Prescott, chief academic officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges.
The arts have not been absent from Harvard’s medical campus, where students play in a popular orchestra and produce a literary magazine. But individual professors have been promoting the arts “in the dark, on their own, ” said Dr. Joel Katz, a Harvard Medical School associate professor who takes students to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to hone their observation skills. Now, he said, the Arts and Humanities Initiative — which includes arts-themed field trips, an artist-in-residency each spring, monthly events like open mic nights, and a collaboration with Harvard’s American Repertory Theater — has coordinated existing efforts and expanded them.
Efforts like these don’t aim to make doctors into artists, said Dr. Kenneth Ludmerer, a professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine who studies the history of medicine. They are “a tool to help doctors understand people and their conditions.” They help doctors see beyond the disease, the “narrow biological aspect, ” to the illness, which includes anxiety, fear, and the whole human experience of being sick, he said.