Arts and Medicine: Connecting the arts and humanities to professional education

The paper describes the design, delivery and student engagement with a course on Medicine and the Arts offered at a College of Medicine in a Middle Eastern country.
The paper shows how the course tries to provide students with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to develop an appreciation for the Arts, and an understanding of their connection to medicine. Literature shows that such an understanding contributes to sharpening students’ social skills, highlighting focus on the humane aspects of medical practice, and linking professional and ethical behavior with an understanding of human essence through exploration of creative self-expression.

The paper also explores emerging narratives related to how the Arts (including humanities) can “re-humanize” medical education and practice and nurture reflexive and interpretive thinking; key skills for medical practitioners. It investigates the extent to which a group of 15 students in an Arabic Islamic cultural context have responded to the claim that the topics they covered in the course, including medical philosophy, history, anthropology, visual art, music, poetry, and film have:

1) Better equipped them to understand themes such as human response to disease, death and dying, pain, empathy, and influence the way in which they practice medicine, manage their own emotions, and communicate with patients.
2) Honed their critical thinking skills, creative aptitudes and emotional intelligence.
3) Helped them appreciate the move beyond the binaries that have separated the worlds of the scientific from the domains of the personal and the humanistic.
4) Shed light on the concept of “whole person care”, and the humanness of the medical profession as well as the relationship between medicine and the arts, and the impact of cultural and social factors on health and well-being.
5) Clarified the connection between psyche and soma and understand the influence of creative self-expression on the healing process.
6) Developed their critical thinking skills, creative aptitudes and emotional intelligence.

Empirical data of this study reply on questionnaire for students, classroom observation and students’ reflective writings. The paper also reflects on how can this kind of innovative course be further researched and accordingly improved in order to better facilitate student learning and development towards their future profession.