The Human Endeavor
By Katherine R. Amato
Posted May 25, 2006
How the humanities entered Med School-and made us smarter
Doctors are getting dumber. They can’t diagnose anything anymore. I’m not just talking about treating viruses with antibiotics either. Doctors are hesitant to ascribe specific names and treatments to most ailments. Take Dick’s House, for example.
Everybody knows that the second you walk in that door, you’ve either got a cold or you’re pregnant. It will take weeks of appointments and arguments before you get them to admit it could be something else, and by that time things have usually gotten
a lot worse. Not so helpful.
Something about that picture doesn’t seem to make sense. Traditionally, people associate being a doctor with being smart, and even if that’s not innately true, doctors do have to study a lot. If you think being a pre-med is rough, talk to a medical student. There’s more work, less sleep, and when they say that nobody rages anymore, they mean it. Science and medicine are life.
So if they’re not actually dumb, why can’t doctors diagnose their patients? They obviously have the training.
The answer is simple: creativity. We all learned years ago that having knowledge is quite different from applying it. Trying to decipher a patient’s symptoms is similar to attempting to solve that crazy physics problem you’ve never seen before on the final. It takes creativity. But creativity is not something you learn in medical school.
That is, until now. Not only have many medical schools begun to incorporate medical humanities programs to train students in ethics, but institutions such as Mount Sinai, Stony Brook, Yale, Stanford, and Cornell are developing programs with classes that focus specifically on the Arts. And while getting a liberal arts education in medical school might sound weird at first, it actually makes a lot of sense.
Obviously painting and sculpture can inform students about anatomy, but the benefits of a medical humanities program reach far beyond that. Liberal arts programs require students to draw connections across different disciplines and to explore the world from different perspectives. They encourage students to look beyond the superficial and to communicate through feeling and emotion as much as through words and symbols. Basically, they foster creativity, and although this endeavor may detract from the intensely scientific focus of medical school, it ultimately will create better doctors who will be able to look at each new case from a more unique, personal perspective. This allows them to make better diagnoses and suggest more effective treatments. In principle, it makes them smarter.
Of course, if you were lucky enough to get a fine liberal arts education as an undergraduate, you’d already have had experience with all this. But does that mean that Dartmouth pre-meds will have an easier time getting into medical school? Well, maybe. Medical schools might finally start to recognize our distinct intellectual advantage here in Hanover. Sadly, however, the only schools recognizing this advantage are the ones with medical humanities programs. And there is only room for so many students at so few schools. Don’t worry though—even if it will be just as hard for the rest of us to get into medical school, once there, we’ll do better because we have more skills. We have the home court advantage.
Undoubtedly, we have always had the advantage. The goals of the medical profession have not changed drastically over time. Technology may be better, but doctors always have, and always will, work with people, and working with people takes creativity. The only difference is now people are noticing this phenomenon. Instead of hoping that our doctors will be creative, we are training them to be creative.
Similarly, things at Dartmouth haven’t changed all that much. We’ve always focused on liberal arts, and we’ll continue to do so in the future. Now, we understand why. Such focus gives the U.S. medical system a head start on the rest of the world. And even though that means I should probably stop complaining about distribs, I’m not going to. I’m sick of them, and I don’t want to take a stupid TAS. Whose idea was this anyway?
Something about that picture doesn’t seem to make sense. Traditionally, people associate being a doctor with being smart, and even if that’s not innately true, doctors do have to study a lot. If you think being a pre-med is rough, talk to a medical student. There’s more work, less sleep, and when they say that nobody rages anymore, they mean it. Science and medicine are life.
So if they’re not actually dumb, why can’t doctors diagnose their patients? They obviously have the training.
The answer is simple: creativity. We all learned years ago that having knowledge is quite different from applying it. Trying to decipher a patient’s symptoms is similar to attempting to solve that crazy physics problem you’ve never seen before on the final. It takes creativity. But creativity is not something you learn in medical school.
That is, until now. Not only have many medical schools begun to incorporate medical humanities programs to train students in ethics, but institutions such as Mount Sinai, Stony Brook, Yale, Stanford, and Cornell are developing programs with classes that focus specifically on the Arts. And while getting a liberal arts education in medical school might sound weird at first, it actually makes a lot of sense.
Obviously painting and sculpture can inform students about anatomy, but the benefits of a medical humanities program reach far beyond that. Liberal arts programs require students to draw connections across different disciplines and to explore the world from different perspectives. They encourage students to look beyond the superficial and to communicate through feeling and emotion as much as through words and symbols. Basically, they foster creativity, and although this endeavor may detract from the intensely scientific focus of medical school, it ultimately will create better doctors who will be able to look at each new case from a more unique, personal perspective. This allows them to make better diagnoses and suggest more effective treatments. In principle, it makes them smarter.
Of course, if you were lucky enough to get a fine liberal arts education as an undergraduate, you’d already have had experience with all this. But does that mean that Dartmouth pre-meds will have an easier time getting into medical school? Well, maybe. Medical schools might finally start to recognize our distinct intellectual advantage here in Hanover. Sadly, however, the only schools recognizing this advantage are the ones with medical humanities programs. And there is only room for so many students at so few schools. Don’t worry though—even if it will be just as hard for the rest of us to get into medical school, once there, we’ll do better because we have more skills. We have the home court advantage.
Undoubtedly, we have always had the advantage. The goals of the medical profession have not changed drastically over time. Technology may be better, but doctors always have, and always will, work with people, and working with people takes creativity. The only difference is now people are noticing this phenomenon. Instead of hoping that our doctors will be creative, we are training them to be creative.
Similarly, things at Dartmouth haven’t changed all that much. We’ve always focused on liberal arts, and we’ll continue to do so in the future. Now, we understand why. Such focus gives the U.S. medical system a head start on the rest of the world. And even though that means I should probably stop complaining about distribs, I’m not going to. I’m sick of them, and I don’t want to take a stupid TAS. Whose idea was this anyway?
