2020, Colorized
Aditi Jagadish (2022)
acrylic on canvas
March 13, 2020. A date engraved in many of our minds. The day the President declared a National Emergency concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease Outbreak. It would be the day we would last see friends and family for a while. The last time we ate at a restaurant. Went to a concert. Saw a movie. For medical students it was a different kind of challenge. Some were pulled from clinical rotations. Others struggled to study for licensing exams or taught themselves how to do lung auscultation via online videos. It was hard to focus on anything when the world was plagued with fear and death. Like many, I used my time in quarantine to turn back to hobbies I had put on hold during school. Art, for me, has always been about making a sense of the world … or an escape from it. So on one dreary day after making yet another batch of banana bread, I asked my brother what I should paint. I took his answer seriously. As I knew, the time we were living in was one that would be in history books. And I wanted to create my own piece to immortalize.
Contributing Writer
University of Illinois
Aditi is a third year medical student, Class of 2023 at University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2019, she graduated from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with a Bachelor of Science in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and a minor in Spanish Language, Literature and Culture. She likes painting, photography and reading in her spare time. After graduating medical school, Aditi would like to pursue a career in Pediatrics.