The Artful Doctor
by Judith Zwolak

It's all in the hands. They touch your back, they press on your neck, they cradle your chin as the doctor looks down your throat. They poke. They probe. Sometimes they simply seek to console.

The hands of the doctor, the nurse, the person who takes your blood are their most important instruments. They read the lump in your breast or they steady your arm for the invasion of a needle. Their touch is professional, yet personal. Who else do you allow to touch you? Your family and friends, perhaps, but not your lawyer or accountant.

Second-year Tulane medical student Cat-Tien Vo hopes to explore the mercurial nature of hands in health care through a personal photography project squeezed in between her classes and studying. Her black-and-white photographs document the hands of Tulane doctors, students, nurses and other medical professionals at work.

"The whole purpose is to explore the idea of laying the hands on patients," says Vo, who is also a 1996 Newcomb College graduate. "Hands are often the first things a patient sees. A lot of time they give comfort to a patient."

Vo's project is an artistic release from her studies, but it also allows her to contemplate the human side of medicine, the aspect not often touched on in her textbooks or classroom activities.

Not one to neglect her creative, right side of the brain under the decidedly methodical, left-brain rigors of medical school, Vo is an energetic proponent of a balanced medical education. To help her fellow students tap into their creative reserves, Vo serves as cochair of the new program at Tulane's School of Medicine with the somewhat playful name, "Students Against Right Brain Atrophy."

SARBA aims to complement the scientific and technological focus of medical studies with creative activities. The program sponsors classes and activities in the performing arts, the culinary arts, visual arts and writing. Members need not be accomplished artists or musicians to belong--an active interest in mining one's creative potential is all that's required.

Cat-Tien Vo When she was a young child, Vo's father gave her a Polaroid camera and let her loose in the back yard. "I must have photographed the same butterfly 10 different times," she says. "I thought, this is great. I was in love."

SARBA's mission statement says it all: "We seek to inspire passion not only for healing, but for learning and living as well."

Only in its second year, the program has organized a variety of professional music lessons in jazz, funk, blues and rock as well as a series of drawing and creative writing classes. Through the program, med students have explored various cooking techniques and learned swing-dancing moves from a professional instructor. To showcase the wealth of musical talent at the school, the group also organized and funded the 30 faculty members and students who teamed up to produce a CD of Christmas music and then donated the proceeds from the sale of the recording to charity.

All of this is nearly unimaginable to the program's benefactor, a Tulane alum whose medical school experience was vastly different from that of his younger colleagues.

A Doctor's Life

When Charles Prosser entered Tulane University School of Medicine in 1940, the normal pressure associated with medical studies intensified with the possibility that the country would soon enter the conflict that would become World War II. Working under an accelerated schedule, Prosser and his fellow students studied from dawn until late in the night, their medical training taking precedence above everything else in their lives.

"We didn't have any time to do anything but work and go to sleep," he says. "That's for the birds; it's not a good way to spend your life, especially if it deprives you of all the cultural aspects of life."

Now retired after 40 years as an internist in Baton Rouge, La., Prosser and his wife, Louise Peterman Prosser (N '44), decided to save future Tulane medical students from cultural deprivation. Together, they donated $60,000 to endow a program that would expose students to "life-enriching and personality-rounding humanities."

Prosser, who claims his major creative achievement was the conception of eight children, says the gift was a way to help medical students as well as their families, their patients and the community.

"I've always had a strong feeling that in premed and medical school, they trained you but they didn't educate you," he says. "We decided to try something that would benefit the students, who we think would be better citizens and better human beings if they had a little of the humanities in their lives during their school years."

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