Visual Arts and Medical Education

The medical clinician and the artist are united in their need for a special visual awareness. For each, sight must transcend the immediately apparent. The clinician must penetrate the surface to comprehend what ails the patient, the artist must pene­trate color, form, and content to define truth.

The essayists and their topics are: Ber­nice M. Wenzel, who holds a joint appoint­ment in the Department of Physiology and the Department of Psychiatry at U.C.L.A., “Medical Education: In Transition?”; Eric Avery, artist, photographer, and psychiatrist who completed his residency at the Psychi­atric Institute in New York, “Hands Healing: A Photographic Essay”; John Cody, author and psychiatrist who completed his training at the Menninger Clinic and has published After Great Pain, The Inner Life of Emily Dickin­son, “The Arts Versus Angus Duer, M.D.” and “A Grain of Sand”; Geri A. Berg, art his­torian and social worker who at the time of the dialogues was cochairperson of the Pro­gram of Humanistic Studies at Johns Hop­kins University School of Health Services, “The Visual Arts in Health Professional Edu­cation: Another Way of Seeing”; John Burnside, chief of the Division of Internal Medi­cine at the Hershey Medical Center, “Visual Arts and Skills Acquisition”; W. Sherwin Simmons, art historian who completed his doctoral work at the Johns Hopkins Univer­sity, “The Transformation of the Language of Vision”; Charles W. Rusch, head of the Ar­chitecture Research and Design Unit of the University of Oregon, “On the Relationship of Architecture and Medicine”; and E. A. Vastyan, head of the Department of Human­ities at the Hershey Medical Center, “Among Other Things, Art.”