Graduate of GHSU [formally MCG], the only program providing a surgical course

The most common question I receive about my career choice of medical illustration is, what is medical illustration? My explanation is usually a simple distillation of the phrase...medical, okay so it is scientific and involving health, and illustration, better put simply as art. Breaking down the formula for the title of a medical illustrator is similar to revealing the illusion behind a magic trick. As the viewer, you know the magic trick couldn’t possibly be reality, because magic and reality don’t coincide. Magic tricks, like medical illustration are a juxtaposition of two worlds, which shouldn’t fit but do. Medical illustration is the perfect balance of the visual formula for science and art.

The need for a medical illustrator was once thought to be purely for documentation purposes. However, modern developments within photography have allowed for medical illustrators to go above and beyond our original purpose within the health industry. In the medical system, from the moment future doctors enter med school, they are learning from images we have created. Because medical illustrators have had had the same science foundation that the medical students have had. From the very basic to the extreme complexities of medicine, medical illustrators illustrate anatomy in its myriad states, from normal to the diseased, to help educate people everywhere.

Magic tricks are progressive acts, which the audience follows from start to finish. The pledge (beginning, you view something ordinary), the turn (takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary), and the prestige (the big finale). Medical illustrators are the storytellers in the health industry. It is our job to make sure our audience clearly understands what is involved when you are finished looking at an image, looking at a sculpture, watching a video, or pulling a kidney out of a hat, kidding. It could be a brochure to help aunt Bess understand why her lungs have developed cancer, or little Lee who is worried his arm will be cut when its time for his cast to be removed. Either way, we need to know how to tell a story for every single person’s needs no matter the education level.

In order to convince the audience the magic is real the magician has to create a visual story they can captivate the audience with. The professional medical illustrator is an individual whose master degree qualifies them to tell a visual story without words. We are trained to understand the systems and organization of the human body in ways only an artist can imagine. We understand the detail and dedication it took to be in the medical industry, and yet we also understand the need to simplify details in order to clarify a point, all through the stroke of a pencil or click of a mouse our audiences understand the story. As a student of life drawing, I could see my visual construction start to change; it altered the way I assembled reality in my mind. I started to draw from the outside of an object in, or draw fully realized objects without using a single line. My view has once again evolved as I’ve learned how the human body is organized. A magician sees his reality differently, knowing the secrets behind the story. I know the muscles that define a person’s back as they bend over to pick up a nickel off the floor, that magnesium is used to block nerve synapses, and the importance of the patent ductus arteriosus in a newborn child.

When you hire a magician for a show, you hire them based in their ability to create a convincing illusion that captivates the audience. This will never happen if the magician cannot do his work competently. The value of having a trained medical illustrator from one of the accredited programs is very similar to a skilled magician. We were trained in ways you may not appreciate. Viewing a surgery from the surgeon’s perspective, feeling the living breathing tissue from an animal on the operating table, and taking med school classes among the future doctors are all achievements I can rightfully claim as developments in making the perfect magic act. There are about 1000 medical illustrators in the continental United States, and only four accredited graduate programs who train them. We are the few magicians able to mix science and art together, and it truly is magic.