Published July 2025
Siobhan Conaty, PhD, is relatively new to the Fellowship, but she has been a part of the College for over a decade, serving as a member of our Section on Medicine & the Arts. As an , Dr. Conaty teaches several classes in art history, including a course that explores the connection between art and medicine, and is the director of La Salle's Health Humanities program.
Dr. Conaty demonstrates how our Fellowship represents a range of professionals, representing a number of institutions and specialties in medicine, administration, ethics, and the medical humanities.
Here are highlights of our conversation with Dr. Conaty, in which she discussed her work focusing on art history’s transferable skills for medicine and the health sciences, her long-standing relationship with the College, and the enduring relevance of figures like Leonardo da Vinci in today’s medical education. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What drew you to the College to seek Fellowship?
I’d been active in the Section on Medicine & the Arts for about ten years when Doug Reifler, the Section Chair, nominated me. We had worked together on several projects and were both involved in the Health Humanities Consortium. He recognized my work connecting art history to medical education, specifically, how art historical methods can serve as transferable skills for clinical observation and patient care.
You serve as the Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at La Salle, where your research focuses on art history’s transferable skills for medicine and the health sciences. Can you explain the connection to those who are new to the concept?
Absolutely. It’s something I find endlessly fascinating. Art history teaches close looking, really training the eye to observe line, shape, color, and pattern, and to interpret visual cues within a broader cultural and social context. Those same skills are critical in clinical settings.
Whether you're a physician, nurse, or public health professional, being able to notice subtle details and understand a patient’s story within their larger environment is essential. In art history, we analyze images deeply, but we also think about the context in which they were created, just like a clinician must consider both the symptoms and the patient’s history, lifestyle, and cultural background.
Art can also serve as a kind of neutral space where students can safely practice those observational and interpretive skills before applying them in clinical scenarios. And beyond that, looking at art has proven benefits for mental and even physiological health. It’s good for us.
Can you tell us more about the students who take your classes? What are they looking to do professionally?
While I do have art history students who take the Art and Medicine course, I also direct La Salle’s Health Humanities program. That draws in a lot of pre-health students; pre-med, nursing, public health, and other preprofessional health majors. They're engaging with humanities-based courses as part of their preparation for healthcare careers. It's a powerful combination for our students, and La Salle has a strong track record of students going on to medical school and other health professions.
Have you noticed a greater shift in focus towards the connection between art and medicine?
Definitely, but this isn't a new idea; it goes back centuries. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, believed that to study art, one must also study science, and to study science, one must study art. He understood that integrating disciplines leads to innovation. That philosophy still holds true today: combining the arts with sciences enriches both fields and cultivates deeper understanding and creativity.
You previously published an article called “How Art History Can Improve Your Care of Patients” in . Can you provide an overview of that connection?
In that article, I draw on a case study from my Art and Medicine course, where I have students treat paintings like patients to show how both art history and medicine rely on careful observation and contextual thinking. I walk through the history and research behind a 17th-century Dutch painting by Jan Steen called The Doctor’s Visit, which is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I use it to briefly demonstrate how art historians work, looking closely for visual clues, interpreting their historical and social context, and thinking critically about what those clues might mean. These are the same kinds of skills that clinicians and healthcare providers use in practice.
I’ve also led collaborative projects to apply this in real clinical settings. For instance, at Penn State College of Medicine, I worked with radiology faculty and residents, teaching formal analysis; how to interpret shadows, lines, color, balance, and asymmetry. These skills are directly applicable to reading diagnostic imaging, and we saw measurable improvements in observation and diagnostic accuracy.
Another project involved a study on breast cancer imagery in art history, where I collaborated with a breast cancer surgeon and a clinical physician to examine how depictions of breast cancer have evolved, from “patient as object” to more recent work by women artists who were patients themselves, and reclaimed agency in the story of the disease and challenged the traditional medical narrative that focused on the physician’s story rather than the patient’s experience. Our goal was to show how visual culture reflects the medical narrative, and how important it is to understand the social and cultural layers of disease.
Transitioning back to your work with the College. You’ve been on the steering committee for the Section on Medicine & the Arts. What brought you to the Section?
It started back in 2015 at a Health Humanities Consortium conference at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. I connected with the then-chair of the Section, Rhonda Soricelli, and we bonded over being from Philadelphia. She invited me to get involved, and I’ve been part of the group ever since.
At the time, there were very few humanities scholars in the space, and most came from literature or narrative medicine. So it was exciting to bring an art historian’s perspective to the table. It’s a fantastic community, full of passionate, curious people from both medicine and the humanities who want to foster meaningful conversations and education.
What is your favorite part of the College?
The community, without question. The Sections bring together such a rich mix of professionals—clinicians, scholars, educators—all collaborating in a way that really embodies the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci’s ideas on the value of studying both the arts and the sciences. It’s a reminder that real progress happens at the intersection of disciplines, particularly with the arts and humanities. The College welcomes voices from across the spectrum, which makes it a dynamic space.
What do you wish more people knew about the College?
There’s incredible programming happening here—engaging events, thought-provoking topics, and brilliant speakers. And as an art historian, I have to mention the architectural space as well. If you ever have a chance to attend a Section event in person, I highly recommend it. The setting, the conversations, it’s all inspiring.