BEAUTY AND TREATMENT

Images of artworks projected on the wall. Exhibition catalogs on the table. Students gathered in discussion.

What makes this scene different from innumerable art history seminars in colleges across the country is that the students here are future doctors in their first year at Emory University School of Medicine.

The art seminar grows out of Emory’s Creativity & Arts Initiative, a multipronged, universitywide effort to make the arts a part of daily life in the classroom and the community.

“Society needs new ways of thinking,” said Rosemary Magee, who chairs the initiative. “Emory wants to promote creativity as a cross-disciplinary endeavor.”

The concept, gathering steam in academia, is backed by research. Studies conducted at Harvard and Yale, whose medical schools have visual art programs, document that exposure to visual art enhanced students’ visual acumen and diagnostic skills. William Eley, executive associate dean for medical education and student affairs, is just as interested in less quantifiable results.

He sees the program as a vehicle for cultivating empathy. It’s a quality that’s critical to the practice of medicine but usually gets short shrift in a doctor’s training, he said.

“We try to graduate humane physicians,” Eley said. “Art is about relationships, sorrow, loss, emotion and feeling —- the major themes of life. Art invites viewers to think about the other person.”

“Art by Emory Visual Arts Faculty” is the first of a series of exhibits planned to bring art into the students’ environment. Informal talks with the artists and curator Julia Fenton are intended to augment the experience.

In her lunchtime seminar, Fenton pressed the students to move beyond the immediate sensations of the images on the screen.

She asked them to question their initial reactions as a form of self-examination, to consider what the works said about society and cultural beliefs.

Alex Rabin, one of several students who stayed well past the allotted hour, found the session enlightening.

“In our curriculum, everything is laid out for us in a lot of ways,” he said. “There is a lot of memorization, not a lot of ambiguity. What’s wonderful about a painting is there’s no one answer.”

Already extrapolating from Fenton’s approach, Bryan Overcarsh talked about the difference between taking a patient’s words at face value and probing for the worries, needs and maybe symptoms that lie beneath the surface.

Alex Dretler observed the importance of doctors’ applying the same principle to themselves.

Eley sees another potential benefit.

“Medicine taxes the souls of caregivers,” he said. “We tell the students that they need to hang on to those things that feed their soul.”