Science Partnering With the Arts Enhances Medical Education

It was a lovely early autumn day, the sort upon which New England’s reputation rests. Color was beginning to seep into leaves that were being illuminated by a golden sun shining in a clear blue sky. Meanwhile, music from my car’s sound system was bathing my ears with glorious melodies. I was honing my visual and auditory senses to prepare for my rendezvous with Vincent DeLuise, MD.

A highly accomplished gentleman, he has excelled at both the arts and the sciences throughout his life. Professionally, DeLuise attended Weill Cornell Medical College and trained in ophthalmology at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute (Miami) and the Francis Proctor Foundation (San Francisco). He then practiced ophthalmology for more than 30 years in Waterbury, CT. During this time, he became highly adept at microsurgical techniques for the eye. Though now retired, he continues to stay abreast of developments in his specialty.

Artistically, DeLuise possesses a lifetime love of music. The clarinet is his instrument—he began playing it during childhood and continues to play it at a high level—and classical music is his preferred genre. He recalls playing in a classical music recital at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology for many years. “Mozart is my passion,” he observes. “It aligns my neurons.”

He credits his melding of medical and musical skills to his parents. Noting that he had the good fortune to be born into a family that was medical and musical, he was exposed to both while growing up. When he was a medical student, he played a leading role in developing the Music and Medicine Initiative¹ at Weill Cornell, a program that continues to this day.

Over the years, he became interested in efforts to develop humanities curricula as a component of medical school education, and he remains active with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard Medical School. DeLuise points to two major benefits of such a program. First, it reduces burnout in medicine, and this is the case even among medical students. Second, such a program enhances observational and pattern recognition skills.

He describes the program with which he’s involved as being rooted in visual art. It begins with exposing students to pieces of representational art. Students are asked to look slowly at the artwork and describe in detail what they see. DeLuise remarks that, without the instruction to look slowly and describe in detail what they see, students tend to jump too rapidly to conclusions. Through the slow-looking approach, they become better observers.

DeLuise cites an article published in 2018 that exposure to art increases medical students’ skills of observation and description. This study by Gurwin et al.² included 36 first-year medical students; half served as controls, while the other half were taught by professional art educators over a three-month period. At the end of the three-month period, observational skills, as measured by description testing, improved significantly in the training group compared with the control group.

Later, students are exposed to non-representational art. This includes music as well as what might be termed modern art. The task assigned to students in this segment is to fashion stories based upon what they hear or what they see. There are no objectively correct or incorrect responses here; crafting and defending one’s story to faculty and other students forms the essence of the exercise. An article by Shapiro et al.³ concluded that students developed skills in emotional recognition, cultivation of empathy, identification of story and narrative, and awareness of multiple perspectives when an arts-based approach was added to conventional medical training.

After listening to him describe the medical education projects with which he’s involved and his decades of ophthalmology practice, I asked DeLuise what links his love of music with ophthalmology. After all, his is a specialty intimately related to vision, so it would seem to be more associated with visual art than music. His response was interesting: The precise finger and hand movements required for performing microsurgery greatly overlap with the precise finger and hand movements required for playing the clarinet.

This highlights the significant involvement of motor function with music. Rhythm, for example, activates the brain’s motor system even if a person remains perfectly still and just thinks about the rhythm.⁴ Dance requires matching one’s movements to music, to the extent that the body’s motions form a melody. And, in DeLuise’s case, the movements of microsurgery and of instrument playing are similar, so they reinforce one another.

Now retired from medical practice, DeLuise has reduced his musical commitments yet remains involved with a number of musical associations in his community, such as the local symphony orchestra, a local chorale, and a summer opera foundation.

In addition, he pens articles under the title “A Musical Vision” from time to time. He describes these as “essays and thoughts at the nexus of music, art, and medicine and the transformative power of the humanities on the healing of the body and spirit.” One of his essays takes a deep dive into the iconography of his favorite composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.⁵ Throughout history, artists have been known to take liberties when creating the likeness of a subject. So, what did Mozart really look like? DeLuise responds, “It has been said that to discover the real Mozart, one needs simply to listen to his music.”