The Journal of medical humanities
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Increasingly, medical educators integrate art-viewing into curricular interventions that teach clinical observation-often with local art museum educators. How can cross-disciplinary collaborators explicitly connect the skills learned in the art museum with those used at the bedside? One approach is for educators to align their pedagogical approach using similar teaching methods in the separate contexts of the galleries and the clinic. We describe two linked pedagogical exercises--Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) in the museum galleries and observation at the bedside--from "Training the Eye: Improving the Art of Physical Diagnosis," an elective museum-based course at Harvard Medical School. It is our opinion that while strategic interactions with the visual arts can improve skills, it is essential for students to apply them in a clinical context with faculty support-requiring educators across disciplines to learn from one another.
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Poetry for the uninitiated: Dannie Abse's "X-Ray" in an undergraduate medicine and literature class.
I recently taught an upper-division Honors class in Medicine and Literature with students ranging from a pre-physician's assistant student and nursing student to English, French, History, and Technical Writing majors. The common thread connecting these students initially was their self-described fear of and helplessness with poetry. ⋯ Poetry provides a good starting place to analyze complex human relationships, and the focus on language and form levels the intellectual playing field: students are all unfamiliar with how to do it and are learning a new skill together. This could be accomplished, of course, with a literary short story, but for the diverse population of students in this class, the brevity of poetry made it all the more appealing.