For about three years now, the Art History department at the University of Groningen has been working together with University Medical Center Groningen to introduce art to junior doctors. This is done not only because it is a nice activity, but because looking at art can help young doctors become better doctors. We attended a lecture for the KNMG (Royal Dutch Medical Association) by Prof. Ann-Sophie Lehmann, professor of Art History, to learn more about this.
There are two goals of the programme in Groningen. The first goal is to train visual literacy. This actually means that you learn to interpret and critically evaluate visible things, something that a doctor encounters every day in the form of patients and their ailments. The second goal, which is also related to patients, is to train empathy. This means that the doctors-to-be are trained to put themselves in the shoes of the patients.
How do you do that? The doctors are asked to look at works of art showing human bodies in different themes. Themes such as intimacy, sexuality, gender ambiguity and death are addressed. While looking, the doctors are asked to say something about the work, based on what they see. In fact, we do the same with people: we see someone's gender, age and body and based on all that information our brain creates a picture. We do this very quickly, all at once. You can also experience a portrait in this way: you see a work of art, the surface and a person at the same time. What’s great about works of art is that you can look at them for a very long time. It's harder with people; they look back.
By taking the time to look at the image carefully and analyse it, the doctors discover that they often make judgements too quickly. Discussing a work of art at length can help doctors to see that you can look at something from multiple perspectives and therefore interpret it in different ways.
In the past three years, for example, the art historians and doctors have visited the exhibition Rodin - Genius at Work at the Groninger Museum, which featured many sculptures of naked bodies. They did this for the theme of ‘intimacy and sexuality’. The exhibit included copies of sculptures that could be touched, allowing for plenty of research into these ‘bodies’. In addition to visiting exhibitions, a more active role can be asked of participants in the programme, for example by having them take a model drawing class. Again they are confronted with a body, but this time the body of a real person. In this case, looking closely is once again crucial. After all, if you can't observe someone properly, you can't draw them properly either. The Art History department also works with artist Annemarie Busschers, who creates larger-than-life portraits. Busschers portrays people as they are, without removing imperfections or signs of illness. It is precisely these elements of the work of art that a doctor can get a lot out of, and her work therefore lends itself perfectly to training the powers of observation of junior doctors: they are encouraged to look carefully and to put themselves in the position of the person depicted before making a judgement. One thing is certain: doctor or not, we can all learn a lot from looking at art