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Medical illustrators clean up distasteful reality PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Sunday, 14 May 2006
Profession aims to aid understanding of the ills that flesh is heir to

By Austin Fido
Columbia News Service

NEW YORK -- Whales are not often found in Macon, Ga.
But in the summer of 1967, Bill Westwood encountered a 5-foot plaster model of a blue whale in a warehouse in downtown Macon. To Westwood, a Mercer College graduate with a minor in art, the model was simply beautiful.
A company called Structofab had a contract to build a life-size blue whale. Westwood, along with other local college students and "some guys off the street," labored in the brutal heat of a Georgia summer, carving hunks of foam into the fins and torso of a whale. A Structofab engineer supervised the work. Pleased with what he saw, he encouraged his crew with the promise of a trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where the foam behemoth was destined to be displayed.
But for Westwood, it was not to be. "I came down with the worst case of mononucleosis my doctor had ever seen," he said. He was forced to quit the project and barely recovered in time to take his place that fall in the graduate program in medical illustration at the Medical College of Georgia.
The fields of art and science meet in medical illustration. The profession demands the anatomical knowledge of a surgeon, the creative talents of an artist -- and a strong stomach. A degree program in medical illustration requires students to be as proficient at dissecting a human cadaver as they are at drawing what they find inside it.
Medical illustrators find work in a variety of settings. The traditional work of the profession is in illustrating textbooks of surgery or medicine. The U.S. Army has a medical illustration unit, medical illustrations are used in court cases to explain injuries, and the pharmaceutical industry makes use of medical art in marketing and educational campaigns.
Ron Mathias runs Anatomical Justice LLC with his wife, Elyssia. Using medical records, X-rays, photographs -- whatever information is available -- they create illustrations to clarify exactly what is at issue in court cases that hinge on descriptions of injuries or medical procedures. To the eyes of a juror, a good illustration can be more instructive than a fuzzy X-ray, and less nauseating than a photograph. "We take away the gore and make it clinical," said Mathias, speaking from his office in Nazareth, Pa.
Mathias has also found his work taking him in "odd directions." He was recently contacted by an old classmate, Rob Flewell, who asked if he would be interested in helping out with producing illustrations for a film.
Mathias, a lifelong movie fan, did not hesitate: "It takes about 90 minutes to get to New York from my house. I got there in 45." Together, Flewell and Mathias produced storyboards that were turned into animations for "Wired to Win," an IMAX movie about cyclists in the Tour de France and the way the human brain reacts to such exertions.
In America at least, today's medical illustrators arguably owe their livelihood to Max Brodel, a German artist who immigrated to Baltimore in 1894. Brodel arrived at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine at the request of Franklin Mall, an anatomist he had met in Leipzig, his hometown.
For almost 20 years, Brodel produced illustrations for physicians at Johns Hopkins, and in 1911 the school appointed him director of the newly created department of art as applied to medicine. The department remains one of the world's pre-eminent centers for the study of medical illustration.
There are currently five accredited programs of medical illustration in the United States and Canada: Johns Hopkins hosts one; the others are run by the Medical College of Georgia, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Texas and the University of Toronto. Accreditation is given only to graduate-level programs, although undergraduate courses are offered by a handful of colleges in the United States.
Whether you're studying for a bachelor's or a master's degree, medical illustration programs require a strong constitution. Jim Perkins is associate professor of medical illustration at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which offers degrees at both levels. Students in both programs must "study and dissect their own human cadaver," Perkins said, "so they get a hands-on, 3D view of the size and shape of the anatomy." Students can also visit local hospitals to observe and draw live surgeries.
The word "illustration" derives from the Latin "illustrare," meaning "to make bright." This archaic meaning may help illuminate the difference between illustrating and drawing. Medical illustrators seek to highlight the important parts of a process or structure, simplifying images where appropriate without doing harm to the scientific purpose of the presentation. To Perkins, the distinction is simple: "Cadavers are messy, drawings are messy -- illustrations translate that into something stylized."
The Association of Medical Illustrators offers members a forum for networking as well as professional certification and continuing education. The association has fewer than 1,000 professional members.
Despite being artists who rarely get to sign their work, medical illustrators profess a deep satisfaction with their profession.
Westwood, 60, now runs his own business, Westwood Medical Communications. He looks back on his career with contentment: "I've been doing what I'm doing for about 35 years, and I haven't had a day where I didn't enjoy coming to work."

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060514/LIVING/605140324/1007/LIVING
 
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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries

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