Aesthetic experience in medical education: Wit as a case of experiential knowledge

This article develops a demanding, though non-exclusivist, version of aesthetic cognitivism and argues for its significance in contemporary medical education. Although the arts are increasingly used to foster empathy, reflection and professional identity formation, their educational value is often justified in instrumental terms, as an enrichment that supports competencies otherwise secured by biomedical training. Against this framing, I argue that aesthetic experience offers a distinctive mode of understanding that can make embodied, affective and existential dimensions of illness and dying experientially salient in ways that are difficult to cultivate reliably within the constraints of formal medical education.Drawing on philosophical aesthetics from Plato and Aristotle to Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and Berys Gaut, and situating the argument within medical humanities and narrative medicine, the article clarifies how aesthetic form can shape perception, attention and moral imagination without claiming epistemic exclusivity. As a case study, it examines Mike Nichols's film Wit, showing how cinematic form enables learners to grasp aspects of vulnerability, dependency and end-of-life experience that resist straightforward translation into clinical description or ethical abstraction. Based on long-term pedagogical use of the film with medical students, the article concludes that arts-based engagement is best understood not as a supplementary add-on but as a distinctive contribution to professional formation that complements scientific knowledge and ethical reasoning.