Journal for Learning through the Arts

In a new required capstone course for medical students, students at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine were asked to reflect on their relationships with patients, their colleagues, themselves and their families, and the communities they serve, using the humanities, particularly narrative domains, as the primary vehicles for such reflection. Here we describe the course requirements and organization, then elaborate on how it was received by patients through not only course evaluations but also our own instinctive sense as teachers of how things went. We offer observations on what went right, what went wrong, and how we might do things differently.