“They are looking at prepared slides of organ tissue, radiolo- gy images and X-rays and learning to be adept at looking at an image and being able to read it,” said Steinmann. “There are obvious applications there that cross over with being able to describe and interpret images in an art museum and reading a medical image.” For second-year students, the focus shifts to lessons that help them have positive interactions and rapport with their patients in the future. Students learn about empathy, better communication and connection with patients by exploring concepts such as visual cues and implicit bias and by par- ticipating in a variety of interactive exercises in the galleries with partners or as a group. For example, in a program session during the fall semester, students were paired up and tasked with drawing an image based only on the verbal description from their partner. The results often reveal unintentional bias, a reality that these future doctors will need to be aware of when they practice medicine. “We get into talking about implicit bias and recognizing potential biases,” said Steinmann. “This means recogniz- ing that they, as doctors, are coming from a very different place from some of the patients that they are going to be working with.” Nationwide, there are lots of other medical humanities pro- grams offered in colleges. While some programs may have a more robust medical humanities curriculum, the goals are the same: honing observation and communication skills and providing opportunities for open-ended conversation and connection between students. “All of these skills have really direct applications to the work they are doing as medical practitioners,” Steinmann said. “They are looking at images. They are communicating with one another. They are describing what they see. They are making inferences based on evidence. Those are skills we are talking about in the museum.” According to Dr. Carrie C. Kelly, the AU/UGA Medical Part- nership’s campus lead for humanities in medical education and an assistant professor of pediatrics, students enjoy the program and it’s a great addition to the student experience at the school. “The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) pro- motes integrating arts and humanities into medical educa- tion for many reasons, but one is to promote well-being for the students,” Kelly said. “I think for our groups, coming to the museum as a whole class is a great experience for them to share and get to know each other a little better, promot- ing camaraderie and well-being for them.” “It has been such a pleasure working with Dr. Steinmann and the amazing museum staff to put these sessions together for the last few years, along with several of my colleagues here at the Medical Partnership,” she added. “I believe that the lessons learned in these sessions will be useful for the students for years to come.”
above and on facing page: Medical students from the AU/UGA Medical Partnership participating in gallery activities with the museum’s education staff.
While spending time at a museum to view art likely isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think about medical school, students in the AU/UGA Medical Partnership visit regularly as part of their medical education. Through a special gallery program led by educators at the Georgia Museum of Art, medical students are learning useful lessons and skills through art, a concept that has been readily em- braced in recent years by medical schools across the country as a valuable component of a medical education. The Georgia Museum of Art’s program had its beginnings under the direction of William U. Eiland, former museum director. In 2018, Callan Steinmann, head of education and curator of academic and public programs, revamped the pro- gram into a more formal, curriculum-based format. Each year, the museum program hosts two cohorts of first- year and second-year students from the AU/UGA Medical Partnership campus in Athens. Each cohort has around 60 students, and their visits cater to the curriculums that first- and second-year students explore in classes. Looking at art, at a base level, offers many lessons that are applicable to the field of medicine. “For the first-year students, the focus is on introducing them to the goals of medical humanities programs and helping them understand the connections between the skill building they can engage in at the museum and its applications to their coursework and clinical practice even- tually,” said Steinmann. Sessions focus on skills such as visual literacy, critical thinking skills, close looking, careful observation, communication, tolerance of certainty and interpreting images. In classes at the UGA health sciences campus, first-year students spend a lot of time learning how to read medical images and understand basic anatomy. At the museum, they engage with objects and learn to use visual-thinking strat- egies that help them learn how to break an image into parts and better understand and interpret it.
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