Thoughts on Similarities Between Artists and Scientists and the Benefits of Studying Visual Art in the Healthcare Field

Science and art connect in many stimulating ways in terms of the thinking behind each, their intuitive and experimental process and their relationship to culture and humanity. The construction of our world as we experience it is why science was created, and in order to organize and comprehend realities, visualization and imagination are essential. Scientists and artists both use abstraction to understand our reality. The involvement of both science and art in shaping modern culture as well commenting on humanitarian events is an important similarity amongst both realms. The connection between artistic and scientific thinking begins to illuminate how studying visual art is beneficial to developing healthcare professionals. Studying visual art in medical school has the ability to improve observational skills (therefore improving the accuracy of diagnoses), increase a physician’s empathy, and to advance a healthcare professional’s ability to analyze digital image based testing. Furthermore, the use of visuals in healthcare, often created by medical illustrators, ties into the inspiration for my senior art exhibition demonstrating my synthesis of visual art and biological study. I am about to go to graduate school to become a certified medical illustrator, and my interest lies in transforming complex scientific information into visuals. The work in my senior art exhibit is an exploration of inner molecular processes expressed intuitively and abstractly through oil paint