The anatomy of self: A medical artist's perspective

Medical illustrators work within and around life's unclear coordinates and are hired to pay attention to these dissonant voices. We work with the sick, dying and dead on a daily basis - from the patient whose life-threatening condition you are drawing, to the cadaver on the dissection table that you have spent months examining during your student training. The 100-year-old specimen in a jar that you paint with delicate layer upon layer of watercolour (building over the hours the full complexity of a painted pathology so that medics can better identify the disease), that act of drawing, that attempted embodied cartography has an impact on your mental health. How could it not? It is difficult to draw sickness; it is difficult to be confronted with one's own mortality so regularly. The act of making such work for a living has implications on the mind and mental health of the medical artist, in addition to their ability to draw the anatomy of emotions. I do not think we talk about it enough within our profession, least of all draw it. This article attempts to explore mostly uncharted and choppy waters within biomedical visualization - the art of drawing the whole holistic self it suggests a new paradigm for medical illustrators to work within - one of radical compassion for what it means to have a body, to live within the brilliant complexity of at body and to draw it through all its states of experience.