Patients and Paintings

Looking at art sharpens visual and dignostic analysis skills. Art and cultural experiences can also foster empathy, a central skill in the caring professions that is given little space in higher education. Encounters with painted, sculpted, or drawn human bodies allow for accelerated judgment of another human individual based on aesthetics, age, gender, disease, or signs of disability and mutilation. Students learn how they act on intuitive judgments and how they can process their observations consciously and reflectively.