Laura Ferguson

An artist in the world of medicine

For me, drawing is a mode of coming to know, in the art-science tradition of Leonardo da Vinci.  That Renaissance spirit of inquiry is at the heart of Art & Anatomy, the class I created at NYU School of Medicine in 2008, when I became Artist in Residence in the Master Scholars Program in Humanistic Medicine.  

On class evenings, the Anatomy Lab is transformed into a studio, with art supplies set out on tables and a great spirit of creative enterprise.  I’ll use some of the students’ own words (from the book Art & Anatomy: Drawings) to tell you why the opportunity to “sit in front of a cadaver with paper and pencil” has such a powerful effect, and why, for many, “the intimacy of drawing these subtleties while training to become a doctor is somehow a humble experience, but also very profound.”

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Art & Anatomy [continued]

To “look at the body with the eye of an artist,” one student wrote, made her feel “blown away by the complexity, elegance, and even beauty of the bones and organs that I saw when I changed my perspective. Laura showed us how to see the inherent beauty in bodies of all shapes and sizes, to focus on the incredible details and appreciate the amount of variation that exists in all of us.”

That’s exactly the non-judgmental point of view I hoped to instill – the recognition that our inner landscapes are unique and individual, and that art can help us to connect with them more closely.  That’s one of the greatest powers of art: allowing contrasting realities like beauty and deformity, health and sickness, pain and pleasure – even life and death – to be present together, without the need to make choices or draw conclusions.  What better place to harness its power than in the Anatomy Lab, where the dissecting of a cadaver begins a process of emotional detachment for many med students. 

“Initially, the anatomy laboratory was a daunting place.” one student wrote. “Many of us had never seen a cadaver before, let alone dissected one. It was unsettling, to say the least. Through drawing, I was able to achieve a level of comfort in the lab that was previously elusive. It was as if changing the approach to them shifted the relationship we had with our cadavers.”  

In another student’s words, “creating art is a meditative experience, and the Art & Anatomy course helped me take that mindfulness into the anatomy lab and find beauty in what otherwise would have been a highly distressing experience.” 

Seeing anatomy as beautiful can be profound.  It’s a way in to anatomy that’s more personal, less generic – that sees and values individuality.  These artists are imagining the living body as they draw: looking at bones and cadavers but imagining the person who once inhabited them, and imagining the living, moving anatomy within themselves.