What Medical Students Can Learn from Monet

The Boston Sunday Globe had an article on assistant professor of medicine Joel Katz, who takes medical students to the Museum of Fine Arts to help them improve their diagnostic skills.

Katz, a former graphic designer who is now an internist at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, tells the Globe that examining art and examining patients have something in common: “We’re trying to train students to not make assumptions about what they’re going to see, but to do deep looking.” And he has data to back this up: a study by Katz and colleagues, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine this month, found that after completing Katz’s class, “students’ ability to make accurate observations increased 38 percent.”

Read the news release about Katz’s course from Brigham and Women’s Hospital here.