A new program at the Telfair Museum of Art marries science with art to help doctors better empathize with patients and get some truly beautiful results
A grandfather furrows his brow in determination, with a stern, stoic expression on his face; a helpless mother is pictured next to him, with her head in her hands, exhausted and most likely grieving the death of her soldier husband. Far away, an innocent little girl leans on her grandfather’s arm for support, both physical and mental.
The painting “Relics of the Brave” by Arthur Hacker depicts the aforementioned scenario and is one of many paintings helping Savannah doctors perfect their observation—and therefore healing—skills.
Visual Thinking Strategy, a concept developed in the late 1980s, is a widely recognized teaching method that specifically uses art to develop critical thinking and increase observation skills, as well as speculative abilities. First used predominantly in education, VTS expanded into the medical field when a group of Harvard medical students started meeting weekly at a museum to observe and analyze sculptures. The Telfair Museum of Art now offers this same method to physicians here in Savannah.
“Visual Thinking Strategy is another way of learning and another way of looking at learning,” says Kristin Boylston, director of marketing and public relations at the Telfair Museum of Art. “Today, doctors are on a tighter schedule than ever, and VTS helps to sharpen their listening and observing skills and making them even more aware of things.”
Telfair staff members have been using VTS for a while, gearing it more toward their tour programs, since it is currently more of a force in education. Introducing it to the medical community has been only recent.
“I’ve always been interested in the potential of art in healing,” says Harry Delorme, senior curator of education, also at the Telfair Museum of Art. A few months ago, after being asked to implement a training session with a group of Memorial University Medical Center residents, Delorme presented a series of images to the group and encouraged the participants to engage in a facilitated discussion about each particular piece of art.
“We ask them to look at the piece in silence, then discuss what’s happening, what the people in the piece might be thinking or feeling and back up their comments,” Delorme says. “We want them to bring their knowledge of the world into the discussion.”
A behavioral scientist at Memorial Health Family Practice, Sherri Schumacher’s role in the practice is primarily “teaching the residents how to be better doctors.” She made the initial call to Delorme after Dr. Robert Pallay, director of the Memorial University Medical Center’s Family Medicine Residency Program, gave her some educational information from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The cover piece was Peter Paul Rubens’s “Massacre of the Innocents,” a chaotic snarl of anguished, biblical citizens, experiencing a variety of emotions, as told by the Gospel Matthew.
“I believe there is a lot of art in being a doctor, especially a family doctor,” Pallay says. “Doctors need to learn the art of physical diagnosis, and figure out how to use that part of their brains. It’s often easy for them to learn the science part, but harder to learn this art.”
Read more in the latest issue of South magazine!
Photography by Shawn Heifert
