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Completely naked, the woman strode into the centre of the room and stood perfectly still. All eyes were on her body. Pencils poised, the life drawing class had begun. Southampton, Keele, and King's College London are just a few of the medical schools in the United Kingdom that now offer life drawing classes for their students. But what can an art lesson teach the medical student who is more accustomed to handling a stethoscope than a sketching pencil?
Exposing medical students to a "range of physiques beyond the textbook" 1 was cited as a benefit of the life drawing course run at Cambridge Postgraduate School of Medicine. When we enter clinical teaching we are faced with an array of bodies at various stages of ageing, obesity, and decrepitude. This is the reality, and the intrigue, of the human figure: not the ubiquitous muscular young athletes presented to us in textbooks. Nike Okunade, in her second year at Southampton Medical School, was struck by the individuality of the life drawing models. "I loved the idea of getting to draw different kinds of people, different genders, shapes, and sizes." She adds, "Familiarity and acceptance of the differences between patients' bodies aids the growth from a young medical student into a mature doctor."
Observational skills
There is no doubt that observational skills are important in medicine; the student who has been taught to truly observe will become the doctor who notices the slight bulge of the eyes of a patient with a hyperactive thyroid before any questions have been asked. This skill of actively looking and seeking out details can be fostered by the integration of arts into medicine. Jo Allan, project manager of Performing Medicine ( www.performingmedicine.com ), a scheme which runs workshops for medical students, explains that life drawing is one of the ways in which the company takes artists "from the cutting edge of contemporary art and applies the disciplines and training skills from...