At UCLA, Teaching Doctors with Art

Artist: Daphne Hill
Second year students at University of California, Los Angeles take a break to visit an art exhibit. The show is titled “Venereal Narratives and Other Cautionary Tales,” created by Daphne Hill, and features colorful collages that combine images of romantic couples and the microorganisms that cause sexually transmitted diseases. The show is part of a project that tries to teach medical students about the importance of showing compassion for their patients. “We’re learning about infectious disease right now, so this exhibit is really humanizing,” said medical student Lauren Wolchok. The artist describes her work as a way to deal with her fears about infectious diseases.
In order to prevent medical students from beginning to see patients as “subjects,” rather than people, the initiative was developed by artist in residence Ted Meyer and Senior Associate Dean LuAnn Wilkerson. It features a series of exhibits at UCLA’s Learning Resource Center. “The Doctoring Program is already about learning how patients experience illness,” Wilkerson said. “Doing this requires really being able to see life from a different perspective.”
The first exhibit in the series was work by Ted Meyer, titled “Scarred for Life.” The exhibit portrays people and their life-changing scars, and deals with the ways people live with injuries. “My work is telling them, ‘You’re working with this patient for just a few hours, but that person is going to think about this, deal with its long-term ramifications,” said Meyer. His images capture an expected beauty from the aftermath of pain.
Via UCLA Today.
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