Pulse
Study Break
Medical students use Art of Medicine awards to explore their creative side.
By Kim Kiser
Since 2007, more than 40 University of Minnesota medical students have received Fisch Art of Medicine Student Awards. Named for Robert Fisch, M.D., an emeritus professor of pediatrics who is also an artist, the monetary awards encourage students to explore the arts and humanities—fields not typically emphasized in medical school curricula. “It’s an opportunity to be more than a laborer of a certain profession,” Fisch explains.
Students have used the awards to take classes or pursue an interest. Some have gone on to produce radio documentaries, record their music, or travel beyond Minnesota’s borders to perform or study with a master of their art.
This year, 10 students received awards. They were honored at a ceremony in April at the Mill City Clinic in Minneapolis. Here are the stories of three.
Laura Waller
When Laura Waller needed a break from studying for her board exams this spring, she would drive to a converted warehouse in northeast Minneapolis, climb a rope, hang upside down, and practice drops, twirls, and other acrobatics.
An aerial artist, she has studied and performed at Xelias Aerial Arts Studio for the past two and a half years. Waller, who is starting her third year of medical school, competed in gymnastics in high school. “I loved it, but part of me wanted to do aerial arts, and it never happened,” she says.
After finishing college at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, Waller came home to St. Louis Park and spent a year and a half working and earning a core certificate in public health before starting medical school. During that time, she signed up for a three-week introductory class at Xelias. “I had a job, I had time, I had money to spend and a car to get me there,” she says.
But after the first class, she almost quit. “It was a 90-minute class, and I couldn’t move afterward. I didn’t go the second week but then reluctantly went back the third week. I thought, ‘Do I really want to do this?’” she says.
The 2010-11 Fisch
Art of Medicine
Award Recipients
Elizabeth Jacobson, ceramics
Russell Johnson, drumming
Kirsten Kesseboehmer, drawing
Justin G.R. Laube, voice
Ari Nahum, piano
Kyle Sanders, dance
Laura Waller, aerial arts
Amy Wentland, ceramics
Tou Lee Xiong, painting
Erica Obara, piano
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Along with calluses, rope burns, and sore muscles, she has gained support from a community of encouraging coaches and classmates. “Together, we celebrate everyone’s individual triumphs,” she says, explaining that the class was made up of people ages 18 to 60, some of whom had never done anything athletic.
Since starting with Xelias, Waller has done six performances, the most recent one being at Art-a-Whirl, an art crawl in northeast Minneapolis. As far as apparati, she prefers working on tissu, which involves climbing a length of fabric, wrapping herself in it, and doing dramatic drops, and Spanish web, which involves climbing a cloth-covered rope slipping her ankle or wrist in a loop at the top, and performing acrobatic moves while spinning.
Waller used her Fisch award to pay for classes and a costume she wore in a recent show. Several of her medical student friends have watched her perform, and one even decided to try aerial arts herself.
“With circus, it’s an hour and a half where there’s no dwelling on medical school, which I think is really great,” she says. “Circus really requires that you be there in the moment.”
Justin Laube
Wearing a dark suit coat and white shirt, fourth-year medical student Justin Laube stepped in front of the audience at the Fisch award ceremony, rose to every inch of his height, and in a rich tenor began to sing “La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto—a piece that he says shows his range. Laube then transitioned to the South African National Anthem, which weaves in lyrics in five languages—Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Sotho, and English.
The anthem has special meaning for Laube, who has family in the country. He spent four months there last year, during which he worked in Zithulele Hospital on the Wild Coast. There, he noticed how much a part of life music was. “There was singing everywhere,” he recalls. “When people would be waiting to be seen in the clinic, they would start singing to pass the time.”
Laube, who started playing the trumpet in the fifth grade and was a member of a concert band at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, had given up playing music during medical school. “But every moment of studying, I was listening to music,” he says.
Then, as a second-year medical student, the St. Louis Park native had a chance to see Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bochelli perform. “Seeing them live made me want to sing,” he recalls. Laube hadn’t sung before. And when a friend gave him voice lessons for his birthday, he discovered it wasn’t like being part of a concert band. “It was so emotional,” he recalls. But he found he wasn’t comfortable singing in front of anyone.
Laube applied for a Fisch award to continue with voice lessons. After returning from South Africa, he began working with an instructor at the MacPhail Center for Music in Minneapolis, exploring different types of music and working on singing in front of an audience. “I had seen ‘The King’s Speech’ right before my recital, and I knew exactly what the guy was dealing with,” he says. “He had an impediment. I was censored.”
For Laube, who will be doing his residency in internal medicine at UCLA in Westwood, California, and hopes to continue with his music there, performing at the awards ceremony was the culmination of months of work, practice, and self-discovery.
“Singing relaxed me,” he told the audience that night. “I learned to go from being a type A thinker to being more right-brained and intuitive.”
Kirsten Kesseboehmer
Kirsten Kesseboehmer has straddled the arts and sciences throughout her life. During high school in White Bear Lake, she thought about going into medicine but also considered studying art. During her undergraduate years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she took premed courses but majored in English. “I wasn’t sure I would be successful in premed classes, and I enjoyed English, so it was a great diversion,” she recalls.
Other than doing a little photography, art fell by the wayside until she took part in an exchange program at the University of Technology in Vienna, Austria, between undergraduate and medical school. Originally intending to finish a double major in biology there, Kesseboehmer took some classes, then put academics on hold. “I decided I would try living in Vienna and not going to school,” she says. She got a job and spent her free time sitting in a plaza near a church, painting. “I would sit next to an old accordion player and would be painting and people would come by and talk to both of us,” she says. “It made me realize how much I missed doing my art.”
When she started taking anatomy class in medical school, she would trace the muscles of the cadaver with a scalpel and imagine recreating the contours with a pencil on paper. Kesseboehmer, who is starting her third year of medical school, used her Fisch award to take a 12-week life-drawing class at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Taking the course meant leaving medical school behind for four hours every Thursday night—something Kesseboehmer found energizing and enlightening. “My instructor had done medical illustrating, and she was interested in the brain and using the left and right brain. We talked a lot about that. She would explain to me how a lot of drawing was a left-brain activity, which was interesting to me. I thought it was more of the other. But I realized you have to use your whole brain for everything,” she says. “And it reminded me to use as much of my brain as possible—to be both concrete and creative—when solving problems in medicine.”
Kesseboehmer came out of the class with a portfolio of Conte´ crayon drawings and prints, a number of which were displayed at the Mill City Clinic for the awards ceremony. She has since participated in several life- drawing coops in the Twin Cities, where artists come together to sketch. She hopes to take a life-sculpting class and also has been thinking about setting up a life-drawing class for medical students taking anatomy. “It’s very important to have a humanitarian approach in medicine and not just look at the patient as a bunch of neurotransmitters,” she says. “You need to look at the person as a human being and how they fit into their environment.”