Art of medicine: Quebec doctors in training visit museum to better diagnose patients

MONTREAL — Classes on disease and anatomy are par for the course in traditional medical training, but a new program at a Quebec university is making visits to the art museum a mandatory part of the curriculum for physicians in training.

Through portraits and sculptures, medical students at Université de Montréal are sharpening their observation and communication skills so that they can better care for future patients.

Aspasia Karalis, professor in the department of pediatrics, said the point isn’t for medical students to brush up on art history but to better understand the “full picture” of a patient’s case, and details they may be overlooking.

Karalis said that interpreting a piece of art develops visual thinking skills that can be applied to diagnosing a patient.

“Is this person someone who is of a certain age? Does this person have a cane? Does the cane seem to be adapted for the weather? … What are the shoes at the bedside?” she said in an interview Thursday, adding that answers to these questions may provide clues about the person’s socio-economic status and other information key to their care.

“Should we be looking to assist them in other ways than just healing their fracture?”

So far, some 400 first-year students from the university’s Montreal and Trois-Rivières, Que., campuses have visited the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts or Raymond-Lasnier Exhibition Centre in Trois-Rivières.

Divided in small groups and guided by an art educator, the medical students are asked to respond to three questions: What is going on in this work? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can we find?

The pre-selected artworks are linked to themes discussed in the classroom, such as communication problems between a doctor and a patient. After students share their interpretations, a doctor who accompanies them explains how their previous discussion on art can be applied to medicine.

For instance, a doctor might have to negotiate competing viewpoints on a patient involving health experts from different disciplines, such as physiotherapists and therapists.

“That process seems very simple and intuitive, but doing it in front of a work of art without having an actual factual, correct medical answer to come to, leads us to have more insight into how we process, and … attribute sense or meaning to what we see,” Karalis said.

Mélanie Deveault, director of learning and community engagement at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, said some of the artwork students are asked to interpret is more realistic, like Lyonel Feininger’s yellow Street II, while other pieces are more abstract.

One of the selected works in Trois-Rivières, a painting by Canadian artist John Der, depicts a bustling scene of people in front of a tramway car. Marie-Andrée Levasseur, director of visual arts with Culture Trois-Rivières, which oversees the medical student workshops at the city’s exhibition centre, says students are asked to look at the painting and justify their observations.

For David Tremblay, first-year medical student, the experience was unusual at first. However, he said he and other students quickly shook off misapprehensions. The workshops helped him reflect on his own thinking processes when diagnosing, he said.

“It really helps with patients because nothing is actually black and white as we see in the textbooks,” he said, explaining that the workshop helped him better appreciate a past experience with a patient who had bladder cancer but who didn’t have typical symptoms.

“Before the museum, we saw other patients and it was way more difficult to accept this ambiguity — to accept that it wasn’t like the textbooks.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 16, 2025.

Joe Bongiorno, The Canadian Press