A photo of an older woman in a bright yellow coat materializes on the screen. The audience cannot see her face, but she appears in motion, with purpose and somewhere to be. A ray of sun lands on her hair, creating a prism of light at her shoulders. This photo and close-looking exercise began “Seeing in Art and Medicine: A Conversation,” a public event held at the Harvard Art Museums (HAM) last Thursday, October 5th. The event coincides with the new temporary exhibition at the HAM similarly entitled “Seeing in Art and Medicine,” inspired by an interdisciplinary collaboration between the art museums and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The institutions collaborate on a program that enables radiology residents at Brigham to visit the art museums multiple times over the course of a year and engage in close-looking sessions. These discussion sessions teach the residents how their radiology toolkit applies to art and visual media past X-Rays and CAT scans. It prompts them to consider how art and medicine collide in visual imagery and to grapple with questions of empathy, agency, and humanity in art. In recognizing these ideas through art, participants begin to reevaluate these same themes’ roles in practicing medicine.
During the talk, the founders of the program engaged in a discussion about how the project came to be, as well as the mutual benefits both institutions have reaped since its inception. This included former Director of Academic and Public Programs at the Harvard Art Museums David Odo, radiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital Dr. Hyewon Hyun, and HAM curator Jen Thum.
The collaboration with the radiology residents places an emphasis on learning in order to emphasize the importance of self-reflection and patience in such a high-stakes and high-pressure career of medicine. “There is that thing [in medicine] about being right. If you’re wrong you can harm a patient … It’s a tremendous amount of pressure to put on people who are still growing and forming their identity as people,” Dr. Hyun said. She emphasized the importance of looking inward during residents’ medical training rather than after early burnout from the pressure of training.
She went on to describe residents as, “still in this prolonged adolescence … they have very little control over their call schedule and life.” In this way, many trainees feel discouraged from sharing their own opinions because they are used to deferring to a higher-up, such as an attending physician, in the hospital. The magic of art and close-looking validates all opinions, and being in museums can generate certain free-flowing discussions and confidence that reading X-Rays cannot.
The entire objective of the program is to engage two disciplines which superficially appear to have little academic overlap and dedicate sacred time to art during rigorous resident training. Most similar programs across the country follow a field trip model with only one or two visits to museums annually, but the Brigham and HAM program consists of five three-hour sessions and two virtual sessions over the course of a year. To Odo, “carving out time and space to do this work … to give it the importance it needs,” matters.
The impact of the program is far from one-sided. In order to develop the program, Odo visited Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which opened his eyes to the harsh reality of medical training and gave him a more realistic view of the life of the medical resident. He attributed the residents, who were mostly formally trained in the sciences, to offering him a differing perspective on the arts and engaging with it in unique ways. Radiologists and art historians’ mutual interest in close-looking and visual analysis connects the two fields in a way that does not seem obvious on the surface.
This common ground between the disciplines is key to the program’s continued success. Upon learning of the collaboration and program, the connection between the two may appear obvious. “We tend to think in the art museum that we have a corner on that market [of close looking]…but we don’t,” Odo joked near the end of the talk.
It may seem that the close-looking sessions in the museum would have little technical benefit to radiology residents who spend hours in the hospital learning just that. But, according to Odo and Hyun, the most important part of each session is the discussion that arises as a result of the close-looking. The museum is a place for conversations that residents might be cautious of having within hospital walls, such as discussions of the role of hierarchy in medicine and how that may impact patient lives. As Odo said, “we let the conversation and discussion meander…it’s not a one-sided conversation.”
Visitors to the Harvard Art Museums can experience this collaboration themselves through the current exhibition on the third floor entitled “Seeing Art in Medicine.” The exhibition engages with the audience and offers them the opportunity to see art through the lens of medicine. It includes works that the radiology residents themselves examine during the program coupled with interactive prompts to recreate the experience of the program. Viewers can apply these themes and lessons in art to their own lives, just the radiology residents do.
Sachi Laumas ’26 (slaumas@college.harvard.edu) can’t decide if she wants to pursue medicine, art history, or both.