The Aesthetics of Health undergraduate visual art course at the University of Texas at Austin was designed to enhance art students’ awareness of cancer’s impact.

For some patients whose survival is extended by disease-modifying interventions, little guidance about clinical and ethical complexities exist.

Word usage and intentional clarity will influence how patients feel about that Whipple pancreaticoduodenectomy surgery.

Priorities far beyond generating morbidity or mortality data are needed to improve patients’ experiences, innovate metrics, and advance surgical palliation as a field.

Clinician-family communication in surgical intensive care units should focus on reducing value incongruence and nonbeneficial operations.

Seeming incongruity between surgery and palliation reiterates patients’ needs for clinicians to be able to identify when and how they should coexist.

A surgeon’s duty is to identify goals of care, including those about quality of life, from a patient’s perspective and to consider how to achieve them.

Portraiture facilitates learners’ explorations of their own and others’ biases, limitations, and approaches to gathering information from and about a source.

A scientist-patient and patient-caregiver sit for a portrait and consider complementary therapy and its value in facilitating observation of patient-caregiver relationships.

No single person should make decisions about for whom or according to which criteria palliative surgery is clinically and ethically appropriate.