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, memorialization, 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 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

above left: Medical student Nneka Molokwu holding her drawing of her mentor and supporter, Executive Associate Dean J. William Eley above right: Student artwork from the Art of Surgery course

proportion in the brain and body (muscle memory), the act of creating a drawing allows the surgeon to freely make mistakes with no consequence. Drawing is also an important communication tool, helping to describe surgery to a patient, and learning to draw can become an uplifting outlet for creative expression.

Many of these medical students have been inspired by this course, although one story stands above the rest. Medical student Nneka Molokwu had no formal drawing training before the class, but her life was changed by the experience. Nneka professed, "I never knew I had such a passion for drawing.”

Now she uses drawing as a much-needed form of stress relief and a way to relax after a long day of medical school and clinical rounds. Clearly, Nneka has excelled at this newfound talent. Nneka sketched a portrait of Executive Associate Dean Bill Eley to honor the support and assistance he has offered her throughout her medical school journey.

Third-Year Small Group Visits

For the last two years, every thirdyear medical student at Emory has participated in a program at the Carlos Museum. Education staff led students through guided observation and discussion generated by objects in the collections selected to relate to their new experiences in clinical situations. The program includes a personal response discussion of an object of each student's choosing as well as sketching opportunities. The interpretations of the art by these astute third-year medical students, who are just beginning their clinical rotations in a hospital setting, have been intuitive and thoughtful. Many students found meaning in a case of ceramic objects in the Americas gallery depicting the lifecycle of a woman as well as in an Egyptian false door where the living and the dead meet. These artworks resonated with the students as they made connections between the art in the galleries and their daily interactions with patients in the hospital.

Several small groups have elected to return to the museum for additional exploration and artmaking activities.Z