This interdisciplinary course improved participants' capacity to make accurate observations of art and physical findings.

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Increasingly, medical educators integrate art-viewing into curricular interventions that teach clinical observation-often with local art museum educators. How can cross-disciplinary collaborators explicitly connect the skills learned in the art museum with those used at the bedside? One approach is for educators to align their pedagogical approach using similar teaching methods in the separate contexts of the galleries and the clinic. We describe two linked pedagogical exercises--Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) in the museum galleries and observation at the bedside--from "Training the Eye: Improving the Art of Physical Diagnosis," an elective museum-based course at Harvard Medical School. It is our opinion that while strategic interactions with the visual arts can improve skills, it is essential for students to apply them in a clinical context with faculty support-requiring educators across disciplines to learn from one another.

This chapter makes the case for two aspects of visual literacy that the authors believe to be generally overlooked: (1) that visual literacy occurs by way of a developmental trajectory and requires instruction as well as practice, and (2) that it involves as much thought as it does visual awareness and is an integral component of the skills and beliefs related to inquiry. This chapter roots these ideas in the theory and research of cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen, coauthor of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) with museum educator Philip Yenawine. Housen identified aesthetic stages that mark the development of skills helping to define visual literacy. Her research is also the basis of VTS, a method of engaging learners in deep experiences looking at art and discussing meanings with peers, a process that, this chapter posits, furthers visual literacy. This chapter presents that body of research and details the resulting VTS protocol. It reviews academic studies to date, subsequent to Housen, that document the impact of VTS interventions in various settings, and suggests beneficial areas for future research. In order to probe what development in visual literacy looks and sounds like on a granular level, two case studies of student writing from existing studies are presented and analyzed. Visual literacy skills enabled by VTS are briefly connected to broader educational concerns.

Many spotlights currently illuminate the challenges associated with medical diagnosis. The National Academy of Medicine estimates that all patients will experience 1 serious diagnostic error during their lifetime, and diagnostic errors are now the leading cause of medical malpractice claims (1, 2). To avoid missing diagnoses, clinicians often order imaging and/or laboratory studies and initiate specialist referrals. However, physicians and patients are also urged to use fewer tests; nearly every U.S. medical specialty and 20 countries worldwide have initiated Choosing Wisely campaigns (3). Evidence increasingly shows that indiscriminate diagnostic testing and referrals often fail to provide definitive explanations or improve outcomes and at times are more harmful than beneficial.Balancing underdiagnosis (missing or delaying important diagnoses) and wasteful, harmful overdiagnosis (labeling patients with diseases that may never cause suffering or death) is often portrayed as the need "to keep the pendulum from swinging too far in either direction" (4).Rather than framing the problem as a simple, linear tradeoff, we believe it must be more fundamentally conceptualized as 2 sides of the same coin unified by the need for more cautious and careful approaches.