Artists teach students the power of observing

A Nebraska medical school takes a nontraditional approach to awaken a sense of humanity.

By Myrle Croasdale, AMNews Staff. March 19, 2007.

Instead of taking notes, medical students and residents at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in February created continuous line drawings and loose sketches of a model slumped in his chair, enveloped in sadness.

The class is a new twist that educators at UNMC in Omaha created to teach students how to observe and diagnose patients. It is an elective featuring a painter and a poet. Scottish artist Mark Gilbert, the painter behind "Saving Faces: Art and Medicine," a series of portraits of patients who have had head and neck surgery, teaches students drawing and how an artist focuses on the demeanor and manner of the subject. U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, a cancer survivor, shares with students how he observes and conveys subjects using sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

A few other medical schools have incorporated art museum trips into their curricula to encourage students to look and think differently about their patients, but UNMC may be the first to bring artists into the classroom to share their creative process.

Katie Lazure, a third-year student, said drawing a live model -- a simulated patient asked to portray certain moods -- triggered her "aha moment." She realized that she often saw what she expected to see instead of what was there.

"When you look from the paper, back and forth, you can get a better feel," Lazure said. "His facial expression is actually this. I'd never spent a significant amount of time observing like this before."