Artful students skew medical school stereotypes

Nestled among the laboratories and lecture halls of the UF Health Science Center, the Thomas H. Maren Medical Student Reading Room is designed to provide College of Medicine students with an oasis of reflection on the physician-patient relationship.

But from one perspective, it’s also a bona fide stereotype killer, host to activities refuting any idea that medical students are simply one-dimensional scientists. A growing association of medical students, organized under the name Kaleidoscope, is using the room to showcase its creativity. Kaleidoscope curates student art shows in the Maren reading room, and organizes openings for these shows that feature food and performances from members of Remembering the Muse, a music-oriented College of Medicine student group with an approach and philosophy that is similar to Kaleidoscope’s.

It ostensibly may be far removed from the demanding scientific curriculum that prepares students for medical practice, but some Kaleidoscope members say participation is encouraging skills that eventually will help them connect with future patients.

“The stereotype of a medical student that is only focused on scientific things is something that I want to overturn,” said third-year College of Medicine student Alex Zusman, Kaleidoscope’s president. “There’s a practical aspect to being involved in art, too. It shows patients that you’re human, and not hiding your creative side gives them something to which they can relate.”

Zusman founded Kaleidoscope last summer with fellow medical students and Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig, the Health Science Center education coordinator and archivist.

Stoyan-Rosenzweig, the club’s faculty advisor, said Kaleidoscope’s roots are found in efforts by the College of Medicine’s class of 2005 to commemorate cadavers used for study. Last spring, medical students held a ceremony honoring these cadavers in the Maren reading room, and installed a piece of stained glass in their memory.

“At the ceremony, I said that I’d like to encourage more students to display art, and after that Alex Zusman approached me and said he would like to get involved by creating some sort of student art show,” Stoyan-Rosenzweig said. “We planned a system for displaying art and organized our first show.”

Zusman said the name Kaleidoscope was chosen because it was the name of an informal group of artistically inclined UF medical students that existed a several years ago.

“This is just our first year, and we don’t really have regular meetings, but if you ask a hundred medical students, 60 probably have heard of us,” he said. “Right now, we’re just getting the word out, and my role is to try and rally the troops for the cause.”

Zusman, who credits the cadaver commemoration ceremony with reawakening his interest in photography, said he helped organize Kaleidoscope to foster his own artistic urges, ignite the creative passions of others and make an environment where students could better get to know each other.

“I looked around my class and thought, here are a hundred talented students, future physicians with diverse interests. We spend all day sitting next to each other in lectures and going through millions of PowerPoint slides,’” he said. “We get to know each other on a superficial level, but I’m convinced that everyone here has something else they’re proud of; creative things that we don’t know about each other despite sitting next to one another in the same room every day.”

One such student is Cooper Dean, a second-year medical student who started showing a collection of acrylic paintings, linoleum cuts and sculptures in the Maren reading room in February. Dean agrees that the scientific and the creative can work in harmony.

“In my life, science and art energize each other,” he said. “A taste for beauty enhances the flavors of medical education and the scientific method offers a framework for tackling conceptual and aesthetic issues of expression. In combination, science and art become an entity much greater than the sum of its parts.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Maren reading room is on the ground floor of the Communicore Building. More information can be found online at http://www.medinfo.ufl.edu/~maren/drmaren.shtml. Students interested in working with Kaleidoscope or those wanting to be notified of upcoming events can contact Zusman at zusman@ufl.edu.