Christy A. Rentmeester, Ph.D.
Creighton University School of Medicine
christyrentmeester@creighton.edu
My session at the first annual meeting of the Academy for Professionalism in Health Care
drew upon content from my elective for 4th year medical students, though the content would be
appropriate for any health professions students interested in cultivating perception skills or for
any health professions teacher interested in facilitating a structured forum in which students
can openly discuss the phenomenon of callousness. I do not have permission to share online
the art object we use in the course that I shared with session attendees, but I can certainly
share the questions I use to facilitate discussion. They are below. Feel free to adapt these to
suit your own goals in courses in which cultivating perception is an important goal.
References to my own work on the phenomenon of callousness in the context of healthcare
are also footnoted below.
Course Title: Clinical Moral Perception, Art, and Medicine
Course Description and Goals:
Observation, representation, and interpretation of visual and narrative information are
critical components of the clinical diagnostic skill set. Such skills also situate clinicians to
be morally responsive, to respond with care to the needs and vulnerabilities of their
patients. Students who enroll in this elective will cultivate these skills by exploring art,
narrative, and related interdisciplinary healthcare ethics and humanities topics. With
guidance from the course director and Joslyn Museum staff, students will compile a
journal. With guidance from the course director, students will also write an article.
Required materials are a notebook (paper or electronic) to bring to the museum. A
purpose of this course is to offer students opportunities to experience art, reflect on their
futures as physicians, resonate with the humanities and visual art in this phase of their
professional development, internalize the humanistic impulses of artists whose work is
represented in the Joslyn, critically appraise their own patterns of perception, and relate
their own sensitivities to their relationships with patients, patients’ loved ones, and
colleagues.
Questions for Interacting with Art
1. What do you see first? Second? Third?
2. To which visual properties of the piece—colors, shapes, textures, movements, lines, curves,
objects, subjects—is your perception drawn and why?
3. What’s going on in this piece that you can learn from its visual properties? What would you
like to know more about this piece?
4. What about the story of this piece can you see by looking at it and what about the story of
this piece did you learn from information external to the piece?
5. How does the narrative information external to the piece influence your perception of the
piece itself?
6. What does your interaction with this piece suggest to you about your patterns of perception?
7. Respond to this series of questions for several art objects at the museum and consider when,
how, and whether your habits and patterns of perception change or persist.
Christy A. Rentmeester, Ph.D.
Creighton University School of Medicine
christyrentmeester@creighton.edu
8. What do your patterns of perception suggest to you about your habits of mind, your thought
processes about how you see visual and narrative information from patients, patients’ loved
ones, colleagues?
9. Which kinds of visual information are most challenging to present and represent orally?
10. What do your patterns of perception and habits of mind suggest to you about your
professionalization as a physician? One purpose of the last question is for you to explicitly
recognize and contrast habits of perception they’ve learned over the last four years that
positively and negatively influence your professionalization. Medical students witness
callousness1 and many are deeply concerned about becoming callous over time. Callousness
expresses that a clinician’s moral perception is damaged, that some factor—institutional
constraints or dysfunctional norms, for example—interferes with one’s capacities to discern
and respond to others’ needs with care.2 One result of becoming callous is that one’s
conception of what others—patients, patients’ loved ones, or colleagues, for example—
deserve from you becomes narrow instead of broad, meager instead of generous, limited
instead of capacious. No wonder students are concerned about callousness: one’s habits of
perception suggest something important about one’s personal and professional character. So,
the final question can be followed-up with questions like these: Which kinds of particulars—
traits or behaviors of patients or colleagues—narrow the field of your perception? Which
kinds of particulars broaden the field of your perception?
1Rentmeester,
C. A., Badura A.B., Kavan, M., “Third and Fourth Year Medical Students’ Attitudes about and
Experiences with Callousness: the Good, the Bad, and the Ambiguous” Medical Teacher 29(4): 358-364, May 2007.
2Rentmeester, C. A., “Should a Good Healthcare Professional Be (at Least a Little) Callous?” Journal of Medicine and
Philosophy 32(1):43-64, February 2007.