Teaching future doctors to sense through art

Subjective sensory perceptions are crucial for the physician to develop an appropriate care plan with the patient. Observing, listening, feeling, and smelling - all these perceptual skills complement medical knowledge. For instance, an internist can recognise certain abnormalities in a patient by their smell upon arrival at the intensive care unit, a radiologist can spot an anomaly on an X-ray at a glance, and a surgeon often knows exactly how best to operate on something by touch.

However, the protocol-based university medical training pays limited attention to sensory learning, as it is often assumed that this tacit expertise is acquired only after years of clinical experience. Nevertheless, with sufficient room for experiential learning, the collaboration between medicine and art in a university curriculum can bridge the gap between cognitive learning and learning based on artisanal practices.

In particular, art can help develop skills crucial to diagnostic ability: it can sharpen observation, strengthen pattern recognition, and teach students to engage with ambiguity without rushing to judgment, especially when looking at art and discussing it together with peers and tutors. Furthermore, by looking at art, students can learn to reflect more deeply on themselves and gain insight into the biases they carry, both consciously and unconsciously. These skills are particularly important because physicians cannot always rely on recognition alone; when this occurs, they must also be able to describe what they see without prejudice.

Guided by these reflections, a number of medical faculties in the Netherlands have been developing and integrating various sense-learning programs into their curricula, tailored to their own identity and local possibilities.

For example, at Maastricht University, between 2017 and 2019, a four-week elective course ‘Does experiencing art make you a better doctor?’ was offered to second-year bachelor students. Each week, the block covered a theme from the triangle of art, medicine, and the senses, involving three different methods: practical exercises using senses, interviews with doctors, and self-study of research literature on art and medicine. Medicine was approached as a craft, in which students were encouraged to consciously develop their sensory awareness rather than merely memorising a checklist of observations. They learned to attend to and interpret forms, smells, colours, tones, vibrations, and other ordinary and abnormal findings. Special attention was paid to concepts such as objectivity, subjectivity, and sensitivity, and their connection to diagnosis in medical practice.

This learning was done through a course in anatomical and model drawing, museum visits, and practical exercises. For instance, during a visit to a Gallo-Roman museum featuring Greek sculptures, students explored their ideas of physical beauty and the extent to which it influenced how they viewed a patient.

In another experiment, the students had to wear the same shirt to bed for a week. Then the shirt was put in a pot, and everyone smelled it. “How do you describe smell? That’s very difficult. You soon fall into metaphors: you smell like flowers, or musty. Can you smell like a man or a woman? Can you smell which shirt is yours?” the programme coordinator, Mieke Derickx, explained to Observant.

By training students to observe, interpret, and verbalise sensory impressions, these exercises cultivated perceptual awareness and openness to ambiguity, a central component of diagnostic reasoning that is often overlooked in conventional medical education.

Other Dutch universities have also implemented art-based medical learning courses, which you can learn about here.