The November 2024 publication of “Making the invisible visible: using art to explore the facade of objectivity in medicine” aptly coincides with the ten-year anniversary of Yale School of Medicine’s (YSM) arts-based museum education program: Making the Invisible Visible. The Lancet published the essay, written by YSM fourth-year MD-PhD student Kerri Davidson, along with Professor Anna Reisman, MD, director, Program for Humanities in Medicine (PHM), PHM Senior Advisor and Postdoctoral Fellow Robert Rock, MD ’18, and Senior Advisor in the Arts and Head of Education and Public Engagement at the Guggenheim Museum Cyra Levenson, MEd, as part of the journal’s “The Art of Medicine” series.
The authors open their piece by setting the scene: “New medical students file into the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) and follow two senior Making the Invisible Visible (MIV) facilitators to the contemporary art section. Most of the students have no idea what a museum trip has to do with medical training; some probably think this is yet another ice-breaker activity.” The students and MIV facilitators gather in front of Kerry James Marshall’s 2009 painting Untitled, which depicts a Black woman sitting in front of an unfinished, paint-by-numbers self-portrait on the canvas behind her. After the facilitators lead the students through a guided reflection on Marshall’s artwork, the group segues into a discussion about medicine’s paint-by-numbers image of professionalization: “a checklist of seemingly objective requirements” that leads to “a narrow concept of what a medical student should look like and act like,” and which asks many underrepresented in medicine students to “obscure facets of themselves in order to be deemed ‘successful.’” Moving throughout the YUAG, the students engage in deeper conversation about the insidious, unspoken acts of professional identity formation that are foundational to their medical education.
“Amidst the constant pressure for clinicians to fit every ailment and person into diagnostic boxes,” write Davidson and her co-authors, “it is easy to overlook how these boxes were constructed, by whom, and for whom.” MIV teaches students to take note of the long, violent, on-going history of this construction and to persist in conversation about the “issues of power, identity, bias, and racism” that result from supposedly “objective” categories.
Yale’s PHM strives to offer a critical perspective on the narratives we tell about our patients, ourselves, and the histories and traditions we have inherited. PHM turns to the medical humanities to better understand the systems we work in, to interrogate longstanding inequities in medicine, and to push toward systemic reform.
Medical Humanities Concentration
The robust success of MIV peer-facilitation sessions over the last nine years has sparked new demand from students for additional programming in the medical humanities. In response, the PHM launched a new Medical Humanities Concentration this fall. Building on YSM’s longstanding tradition of pedagogical innovation, the new curricular concentration offers students opportunities to develop their skills as writers, thinkers, and artists as they foster greater community engagement with issues of social and health-based justice.
In addition to attendance at an annual seminar series, requirements for the concentration include 20 hours of hands-on practicum experience and a final capstone project. Students may choose from two seminar tracks. In the Writing for the Public track, YSM Writer-in-Residence Randi Epstein, MS, MD ’90, MPH, trains students in the arts of high-impact journalism and storytelling. In the Critical Health Humanities (CHH) track, MIV founder Rock and Levenson use the MIV curriculum as the central model for an arts-based social justice pedagogy surrounding issues of health equity. An MIV anniversary celebration will take place at the YUAG in February 2025, which will include participants in the CHH track.
YSM now offers MD and MD-PhD students three concentration options: Medical Humanities, Biomedical Ethics, and Medical Education.