PRINTGross anatomy’s masterpieces
There’s more to medical illustration than biology classes
August 16, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Stacy Turpin spends a typical day in her office at University Hospital drawing intestines and tweaking illustrations of stomach lining. During her time off, she enjoys creating portraits of family members and friends. “It’s nice to do outside the body every once in a while,” she says.
As a medical illustrator, Turpin’s art depicts the inner workings of the human body. These mini-masterpieces that appear in textbooks, the doctor’s office and plenty of pharmaceutical promotional materials require both artistic and scientific talent. Steven Harrison, department chairman and associate professor at the Medical College of Georgia’s medical illustration program, says that certain aspects of medical practice can’t be photographed, so they must be drawn.
The artwork is everywhere, but the degree programs aren’t. There are five graduate programs in medical art that are accredited by the Association of Medical Illustrators.
• Medical College of Georgia www.mcg.edu/medart
• University of Illinois at Chicago www.ahs.uic.edu/ bhis
• Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (hopkinsmedicine.org/ medart
• University of Texas at Dallas Southwestern Medical Center (utsouthwestern.edu/ biomedcom)
• University of Toronto www.bmc.med.utoronto.ca/ bmc
No, it isn’t a scene from the latest Resident Evil video game; it’s an artist’s ...
This image of neurons and synapses is an examples of computer-assisted medical illustration produced by ...
Villi lining the intestinal wall.
Stacy Turpin’s illustration of a laparoscopic adrenalectomy will be in a DVD for practitioners.
- Creating lasting impressions
- Animals roam local artists' works
- Dreamscapes and fantasies
- Domestic bliss
- Art pulls in
- Off the hook street art
- Carol LeBaron's "Endangered Species" exhibition
- Featured Artistans of Bluestem
- Featured Artisans of Bluestem
- A Kid’s Tale: An Evening of Shakespeare
- "Figuratively Speaking"
Artistic springboard
Some technical artists are classically trained. Turpin received her master’s at the Medical College of Georgia after graduating from MU and studying art in Italy. Mark Miller, a medical artist based in Kansas City and MU grad, fulfilled the requirements for a premedical degree but has a Bachelor of Fine Arts. “I had one foot in art and one foot in pre-med,” says Miller, who got his master’s from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Miller’s first paying job was to create a lab manual for his professor. Now he has done work for at least 11 different book publishers, creates conceptual pieces that depict drug reactions for pharmaceutical companies and has worked on many medical legal illustrations.
To help them prepare for this potential career, Georgia’s art graduates have to take a course where they perform surgery on animals. “We were just as involved as the med students,” Turpin says. Harrison believes the hands-on nature of the course makes the art more personal. Turpin remembers operating on pigs, an experience that proved important to her craft because tissues act differently when still alive. “It was the most fascinating thing,” she says. “It really helps to learn how the living tissue acts. You don’t want to make the tissues look like cloth. You have to see how it reacts to your pushing and pulling.”
Today Turpin works directly with surgeons and doctors at University Hospital, many of whom are putting together presentations or writing for medical journals about their latest surgical techniques.
“Cadaver experience was the most useful,” Turpin says. “Medicine is so visual.” But since graduate school, she has not had to sketch a cadaver. Her artwork tends to begin in conferences with doctors and their preliminary sketches, as well as anatomy books and videos from surgery.
Turpin has visited an operating room a couple of times to take notes. “It’s hard for doctors to explain unless they’re doing it,” she says. She has even helped some doctors patent new instruments by doing illustrations for them.
Computing the corpus
At the MU School of Medicine’s Office of Communication & Innovation, programmers and designers Nathan Bleigh and Tim Linder work on many projects involving medical illustrations and animations. Although they use computers to create two-dimensional drawings and 3-D modeling, the two begin many of their projects as storyboards. Recently these two and others have worked on production for a 3-D video for YouZeum. The video features lifelike cross sections of organs and realistic depictions of human body processes. Bleigh says that a lot of what they do starts with medically accurate 3-D model banks. The team has also consulted with pathologists and gone into a cadaver lab.
Roughly 90 percent of current medical illustration is digital, according to Miller.
“We experienced a big switch in the early ’90s,” Harrison says. “The dot-com era really changed everything.” He thinks the move to more computer-generated illustration has helped their industry and increased the number of jobs in the field.
Turpin, who is in the process of getting certified by the Association of Medical Illustrators, gets a thrill out of telling people what she does. The “oh, I’ve never thought of that before” reaction is classic. “It’s a behind-the-scenes job,” she says.
