Training Doctors by Observing Art

I have written before about how seeing and absorbing art is good for our health. I had never realized that art can actually give us clues to illnesses and can be used in training doctors today. I recently learned this through an article in ArtNet, by Vittoria Benzine, called “Botticelli’s Venus May Hold Clues to a Fatal Illness, Researchers Say.” I was curious enough to look further. Turns out this is nothing new; I was just ignorant of it.

A decade ago, Katrina A. Bramstedt, PhD, MA, wrote an article in the AMA Journal of Ethics, “The Use of Visual Arts as a Window to Diagnosing Medical Pathologies”. In it, she says, “Observation is a key step preceding diagnosis, prognostication, and treatment.” She refers to the “capacity to identify and analyze facial features, emotions, and general bodily presentations”, which can be taught by using paintings and film, and gives concrete examples.

Returning to Benzine’s example of Botticelli, I will leave it to you if you wish to find out the medical details. It has been almost universally accepted that Botticelli’s model for Venus in his most famous painting, “The Birthty of Venus,” and the way she gazes into the distance, was Simonetta Vespucci and that she died at 23, which has always been attributed to tuberculosis. However, a recent paper by Paolo Pozilli of Queen Mary University of London asserts that she probably died of pituitary adenoma. It is a benign tumor that develops in the pituitary gland. This diagnosis is supported by the fact that Vespucci never had children, yet in a portrait of her, also by Botticelli, in the Heinz Kisters Foundation in Switzerland, she is depicted with her breast producing milk. Algorithms have been used to trace changes in her face and gaze that point to a rapidly expanding pituitary tumor which ultimately killed her. Pozilli also delved into archives to learn more about Vespucci’s life to back up this theory. (Images Vespucci then detail of Venus, Caption detail of Venus’ Face)

Detail of the face of Venus

In 1981, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at Ruben’s “The Three Graces” of 1639, now in the Prado, Madrid. The subjects’ twisted fingers and swollen wrists show evidence that rheumatoid arthritis existed centuries earlier than previously documented in the medical literature. Here is a detail from that painting.

One painting that I was particularly interested in was Quentin Massys’ portrait of the Ugly Duchess (1513) in the National Gallery, London. 

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2023/04/the-ugly-duchess-and-her-partner.html

I had wondered about her facial deformities, including an elongated upper lip and distorted forehead. Doctors have diagnosed that as Paget’s disease, a bone disorder. This was decades earlier than when it was formally classified by modern medicine.

A more recent example is Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting, “Christina’s World” (1948) in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. While it was always assumed that Christina suffered from polio, in 2016 a pediatric neurologist, observing the subjects’ wasting limbs, physical posture, structure of her hands and feet, came to the conclusion that she had Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. No, I had never heard of it either. It is a rare inherited neurological disorder that causes a progressive degeneration of peripheral muscles.

Some time ago I read about a University Art History Professor who had his students pick a single painting in a museum and observe it for three hours before writing a report on it. I know I would not be able to do it, but I asked my art historian and curator wife if she could, since I can go through most of an exhibition in the time it takes her to look at just two or three objects. She also admitted, “No, not three hours”.

Although I have now read about the importance of observation of art in medical science as well as art history, I still think you need to keep coming back to a work of art, not stand in front of it for three hours straight. Each time you return, you see something you missed the last time.