MEDICAL CENTER REPORT MEDICAL CENTER REPORT06/11/08
BY AMY ADAMS
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 Video length: 3:41 min. |
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MD candidate Joanna Wrede |
For a person who grew up influenced by her grandmother’s love of art and nature, it makes sense that Joanna Wrede would mix arts and humanities into her time in medical school.
Wrede, who is about to graduate with her MD, didn’t arrive at Stanford expecting to indulge her interest in art. But with an undergraduate research project under her belt, medical research already started at Stanford the summer before medical school, and a science-dense course load, her intention of doing more laboratory work for her scholarly concentration seemed too science-intensive. Instead, she turned to biomedical ethics and medical humanities.
“I felt my brain needed to stretch into some other corners,” she said. “It let me take a breather from the heavy science and kept the science interesting.”
Wrede paired her interest in art with a trip to Papua New Guinea, producing a photo essay of the trip funded with the help of traveling scholars grant through the Medical Scholars Research Program.
“The trip itself was enormously eye opening in terms of the importance of basic community health,” Wrede said. She was part of a team that taught basic medical practices to village medics. Being behind a camera gave her some time for reflection. “It let me step back and be an observer,” she said.
What Wrede brought back from the trip was a realization that science alone doesn’t produce a good doctor. “It taught me that the science isn’t effective if it’s not in context of the patient’s wants and needs,” she said.
That Wrede gained valuable insight through art is a tribute to her grandmother, who first taught Wrede the importance of exploring both nature and art.
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