Dr. Doodles


I can remember when I first started drawing I was obsessed with precision and making thing proportional when sketching a person.  I no long wanted to draw eyes too far up on the head like I did when I was a kid.  In my early 20s I discovered a book called “Artistic Anatomy” by Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer (originally published in 1889) hoping to study it to become better at sketching the human form.  The book went into the particulars of the human body and it followed the same practices that da Vinci did when he merged artistic and scientific observation (Irving).  The artistic eye was used to further medical research as it did required great attention to detail. 

Body Code is a collection of biomedical animation displayed in galleries to gain public interest in scientific knowledge.  The detail of the cellular phenomenon can be quite a vision when magnified from its molecular scale.


In recent times, we have separated medical science from the world or the arts and there has been great effort to bring them back together.  For instance, Colby College in Waterville, Maine has an area of study that investigates the intersection of the two disciplines (Boyle).  But the keen eye for detail is not the only thing that is attracting educators to the connection between the arts and medical science.

Virginia Commonwealth University is doing some fascinating things as the Arts and Medicine departments are co-programming to aid med student and practicing doctors. Sculptures are being used as practicing tools for surgeries so that doctors can develop an effective plan action of the operating room and student can get a firmer grasp of the physiological aspects of their studies.



There is an emerging field dubbed medical humanities that is using art as tool to teach future physicians skills that have been lost due to an emphasis on the hard sciences.  A number of professors are claiming that an arts education and be “valuable in developing essential skills that doctors need, like critical thinking and observational and communication skills, as well as bias awareness and empathy” (Lesser).  These skills have an effect on patient care as art interpretation can directly translate into interpreting a patient’s demeanor, pain, and appearance to develop an effective plan of action for care (Hoinski). 

Harvard Medical School is one of the leading programs to use art as a training mechanism for future physicians.



Work Cited:

Richer, Paul Marie Louis Pierre. Artistic Anatomy. Watson-Guptill Publications, 1986.

Irving, Carolyn. “The Correlation Between Art and Medicine.” The Almost Doctor Channel, 18 May 2016, almost.thedoctorschannel.com/the-correlation-of-art-and-medicine/

Berry, Drew. “Body Coding.” Walter + Eliza Hall, 2003. www.wehi.edu.au/wehi-tv/body-code

Boyle, Gerry. “The Intersection of Art and Medicine.” Colby Magazine, Spring 2015, www.colby.edu/magazine/the-intersection-of-art-and-medicine/

Chafin, Carlos. “VCU: Medicine Through The Eyes of Artists.” Youtube, Nov. 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=366&v=S0t7plsqYqk

Lesser, Casey. “Why Med Schools Are Requiring Art Classes.” Artsy, 21 Aug. 2017, www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-med-schools-requiring-art-classes

Hoinski, Michael. “Improving Medicine With Art.” The New York Time, 11 Mar. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/arts/improving-medicine-with-art.html

Harvard University. “Creativity, medicine, and the arts.” Youtube, June 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=emuj7Sp24dw


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