Emory University School of Medicine and The Carlos Museum Over the last few years, the Carlos Museum has partnered with Emory’s School of Medicine to develop elective courses and in-gallery programs to help nurture wellrounded, compassionate, and patient-focused physicians. This partnership extends to many areas, but these are the three most notable areas of collaboration: The Art of Palliation Practicing palliative care requires sustained compassion, self-reflection, and collaboration. The challenge is to provide empathic and effective care to patients and their families despite the daily barriers encountered in the healthcare system. To address this challenge, the museum worked with Paul DeSandre, DO, FACEP, FAAHPM, Ali Zarrabi, MD, FAHHPM, and High Museum of Art staff to develop a three-part, art museum-based experiential curriculum designed to foster clinical and team-based skills outside of the usual structures and hierarchies of the healthcare environment. The first session focused on self-awareness through critical observation and active listening skills. The second session explored mortality and meaning through the exploration of objects related to funerary rituals, memorial-
ization, and memory. The third session addressed empathy and the tolerance of uncertainty. In each session, faculty, fellows, and museum staff reflected on these experiences relative to the practice of palliative care. The Art of Surgery The Art of Surgery, an elective course offered for the first time in the Fall of 2020 through the Emory School of Medicine, concentrated on the places where art and medicine intersect. Carlos Museum’s Ingram Senior Director of Education, Elizabeth Hornor, worked with Dr. Stephanie Drew, Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery, and Atlanta artist Emily Hirn to develop a five-session elective course for medical students who plan to go on above: The students in the Art of Surgery course
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to become surgeons. The course, which is a combination of lectures, demonstrations by artists, drawing experiences in the Carlos Museum’s galleries, and critique, illuminates the connections between drawing and surgery. Through this course, students learn that drawing increases a surgeon's ability to visualize, strengthening the ability to mentally walk through a procedure prior to executing it. Drawing also improves hand/eye coordination and fine motor control; in fact, learning to be sensitive to the line weight by varying the pressure applied to brush, charcoal, or pencil relates directly to the surgeon’s challenge of delicately using pressure on the surgical tool on varying tissue strengths. While drawing from sculptures of the human figure embeds anatomical knowledge and
