The student physician’s palette

Last year’s fifth annual WHITE COAT, Warm ART exhibit, run jointly by the medical humanities programs at the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta, featured 60 submissions from medical students and physicians, including paintings, sketches, sculptures, music videos and installations. Most of the works aimed to capture the experience of learning and practising medicine.

The three images presented here express medical students’ perceptions in learning anatomy. This territory has also been the subject of Anatomy of Anatomy in Images and Words (Third Rail Press; 2000) by Meryl Levin, a documentary photographer who immersed herself in an anatomy course at Cornell University, and One Breath Apart: Facing Dissection (Baywood Publishing; 2009) by Sandra Bertman, a thanatologist who compiled drawings and writing by students in a gross anatomy course at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Many of the students in the WHITE COAT, Warm ART exhibit use art to study and recall anatomy, as a visual reinforcement of what they are learning, but these works are a celebration of the beauty of the internal world and the individual interpretation we each bring: eye of the beholder.

Piecing It Together, paper on paper, Taryn O’Neill, Dalhousie Medicine New Brunswick, class of 2016. O’Neill writes: “This piece progressed over my first and second years of medical school as I became more familiar with anatomy. Quilling is a form of art that entails rolling paper into different shapes and arranging them to create an image. This was similar to my approach to learning anatomy where I had to understand each part separately before I could understand it as a whole.”

Image courtesy of Taryn O’Neill

Anatomy of a Healer, acrylic on canvas, Susan Mengxiao Ge, McGill University, class of 2016. Ge writes: “As we journey through our medical education, we all experience struggles that help us grow. This painting conveys the transformation of a student into a physician and a healer. Each layer of anatomy is a key characteristic that builds upon the basic infrastructure of ‘knowledge,’ is nourished by the lifeblood of a ‘dream,’ all adding flesh and substance to the outstretched ‘healing hand’.”

Image courtesy of Susan Mengxiao Ge

Untitled #1, pen on paper, Jessica Kapralik, University of Ottawa, class of 2016. Kapralik writes: “I find that when studying, it is easy to get so caught up in the mechanics and memorizing that I forget why I became interested in medicine to begin with. Expressing the body from a more creative perspective helps to remind myself of the complexity that attracted me to a field in which I can work with the body and all of its intricacies every day.”

Image courtesy of Jessica Kapralik