On Jan. 16, the Students for Health Humanities Club joined tour guide Abby Jafek on a tour of the Museum of Art, connecting the medical and art worlds ahead of the upcoming medical school.
The tour, still a work in progress by the Museum of Art, and headed by Jafek, is titled “The Art of Medicine: How Artists and Clinicians Think Alike.”
The tour intended to foster new interdisciplinary partnerships on campus, connecting art and other — seemingly unrelated — fields.
“I've been trying to reach out to professors across campus, just gauge what their interest has been,” Jafek said. “The hope is that the research that I've been doing will be shared with different departments.”
The still-unfinished tour was taken by the Students for Health Humanities Club — a club that focuses on understanding health and medicine through the lens of humanities.
For Angela Wentz Faulconer, the advisor to the club and an ethics professor, the intersection between health and humanities lies in the "embodied human experience."
“We don't have to be pre-med students to be interested in the embodied human experience. We're all human beings and we all have bodies,” Faulconer said. “When you're at the museum, you're partaking of that embodied human experience — and that's what humanities is all about.”
For Jafek, the effort also works towards a goal to bring more people — from any discipline — into the museum.
“I think lots of people are intimidated by museums because they don't … understand what they're looking at,” Jafek said. “The museum is for everyone.”
The tour intends to not only bridge the gap between two seemingly unrelated fields but also to show people that anyone from any background can connect with art.
“We have this idea that only … certain people can understand the museum,” Jafek said. “The hope is that everyone comes to the museum despite what their interests are, and finds something that's relevant to them in the artwork.”
The tour itself focused on how mindsets and thought patterns important for being an effective health practitioner can also be applied to seeing, understanding and interpreting art.
Approximately half of the hour-long tour was spent discussing and analyzing Carl Heinrich Bloch’s famous 1883 piece “Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda.”
The tour sought to teach the attendees the skills of deep seeing, recognizing patterns, analyzing facial expressions, and noticing pertinent negatives — all of which are skills that apply to both medicine and art.
“To really appreciate a painting or an artwork, you've got to spend time with it. You get out of it what you put into it. So if you just do the drive by … you just walk quickly through, then you don't really absorb that much, but if you come and visit just a single painting or two, then you learn so much more,” Faulconer said.