Ricerc@Sapienza

This study describes how Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) as a methodological practice can help medical students learn and acquire analytical ability. This ability, capable of improving observational acumen and generally acquired only after years of clinical experience, may be achieved also by recourse to the systematic and reasoned examination of the visual arts, in particular paintings.

Students attending the third year Medicine and Surgery degree-course, within the ambit of the faculty’s integrated medical-scientific and humanities teaching-learning activities, followed an elective course which began with a preparatory-explanatory lecture on the analytical methodologies applied to the study of art, followed by a practical workshop held at Rome’s Galleria Borghese and ended with a third and final lecture where the students themselves provided the teachers who conducted the course with direct feedback regarding the three phases of the course.

The students’ appraisal of the experiences was positive; the experiment is on-going and has been extended to embrace other courses held by the Sapienza University.

Further observations are needed at present to validate the effectiveness to medical training of this kind of course in the long term, even though the limited number of experiments carried out in other countries, whose historical and artistic heritages are undoubtedly not so rich as Italy’s, attest to their undeniable usefulness to students of medicine and surgery at both analytical and, no less important, humanistic-educational level.