by Here’s an anatomical drawing of a colon from a medical school student:
Let there be no doubt that a doctor that can effectively draw is better able to bring comfort and understanding to patients:
Trawling through pages and pages of notes I’ve made over the last year
and a half, I’ve come to realise that medical school isn’t just about
memorising thousands and thousands of facts.A by-product of an endless onslaught of diagram-after-diagram has left
me with an unexpected, entrenched appreciation for the creative face of
medicine.
There are many times when doctors need to express an idea beyond words and we all know MDs are infamous for their lousy handwriting — so when we find a medical student that can draw with such meticulous beauty — we know that talent for art will lead to a better and faster healing.
We need to remove the notion that doctors are cute in their messiness. We need to require precision and meaning and a verifiable aesthetic talent in our surgeons, dentists and veterinarians because art connects the logical mind to its forgotten passions.
I was always under the impression that poor doctor penmanship came from excessive note taking in college – is this not the case anymore with notes being taken on computers?
Ha! I thought the excuse for an MD’s poor penmanship, Gordon, was that they didn’t have to worry about anyone but a pharmacist reading it. I know pharmacy students are educated in having to decipher a doctor’s scrawl and what a terrible way to misunderstand something in the writing and the interpretation? Deadly results matter!