Contributing Writer
Penn State College of Medicine
Yan Leyfman is a medical student at the Penn State College of Medicine.
The roses portrayed in this photograph represent a new generation, with a brighter vision and new hope for a more prosperous future. They illustrate the ideas of innovation within the realm of medicine, technology and science. These two lone creatures, with their majestic scarlet petals, shine brightly as beacons of industrialization for the advancement of our society to the 21st century.
The sarcophagus before me dominates the exhibition. Intricately carved animals, including a line of fierce lions, arise from the slab of marble. Peering more attentively, I even notice the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, wielding her characteristic shield and helmet. A horse pulls a chariot, and perhaps that is Hector there on the ground, the Prince of Troy now fallen.
The beating heart is autonomous, having its own electric circuit to stimulate each contraction. Throughout the ages, the mystery of the heart has symbolized love and life in art and religion. Although this pulsing muscle has been highly studied by scientists, doctors and medical students across the world — dissected and scrutinized to the smallest detail — the aesthetic and metaphorical power of the human heart remains unchallenged.
The role of a medical caregiver is often daunting. While balancing multifaceted skill sets such as understanding of pathophysiology, proper application of clinical skills, minimizing health care costs, physicians must also maintain the primary goal of empathetic and supportive care for each patient. It is thus sometimes inevitable for physicians, medical students, or any other health care professionals to get caught up in any one of these pursuits and neglect another.
My inspiration for this piece stemmed from my experience working on the pulmonology service during my internal medicine rotation. I was moved by the vitality of our bodies and the organs that allow us to function. The lungs are one of the few organs that directly associate with the outside environment. Everything we breathe becomes part of our body, and as much as our body and respiratory epithelium can filter the air we breathe, it is not a perfect system. As a result, we breathe the world around us.
For the majority of medical students, gross anatomy is the first time that we observe and cut into the flesh of preserved cadavers. Whether it is through a longitudinal year-round program or a semester’s worth of concentrated anatomy, most of us develop a unique relationship with the cadaver gifted to us by generous donors.
Today, a person’s zip code is a better indication of their health than their genetic code is. We know that physical communities experience shared sickness, whether linked to trauma, viruses or unavailable nutrition, and there are established biomedical consequences to poverty and segregation. Acknowledging these links, however, only gets us so far; successful intervention demands thinking deeply about the relationship between patients and their communities. Rochester, NY is home to an innovative attempt to combating these issues. It is one that challenges traditional ideas of what factors define health and consequently, what metrics define therapy.
In this piece I hoped to portray that while physicians are healers who often hold life in their hands, in many ways, it is the patients who give life to the physicians. Each patient we see is a unique hue or brushstroke in our medical training and careers, adding color and texture which transforms an otherwise monochromatic existence into a full spectrum of experiences.
Photography taught me how to see. It taught me to listen using my eyes, rather than my ears alone. This is something that I have carried with me throughout the beginning of medical school. Though some people assume that the arts and the sciences do not mix, photography has actually informed how I envision my work as a physician.
“If I begin to repeat myself, just tell me. I have Alzheimer’s. At least, I think I do,” the elderly gentleman said with a smile. This elderly patient of mine was a jovial gentleman and in fantastic shape with unremarkable vitals on physical examination. If it was not for his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, the physical and emotional state of this patient given his age is nothing less than enviable.
I walk around, wide-eyed yet confused. It seems so different. I always thought I was too objective for my art friends and too subjective for my science friends. But was that really an accurate reflection of my own personality? Medicine is about reductionism, objectivity and straightforwardness. In medical school, I’m learning a method of communication in which empathy is taught as a route to finding out more about a patient; it’s conveniently called the patient-centered …
Art has been one of my passions ever since I could hold a pencil — an important outlet for expression, relaxation and reflection. However, I never found an intersection between art and medicine until I discovered medical illustration in college. This is the field in which artists take medical school classes alongside medical students to become experts in anatomy, histology and pathology, the field which is responsible for providing the textbook and anatomy atlas illustrations …
Columnist Emeritus
Mayo Clinic
Dr. T. N. Diem Vu, MD is a surgical critical care fellow in the Mayo Clinic Department of General Surgery. She graduated from Mayo Medical School in the Class of 2016. She completed a BS in molecular & cellular biology with a minor in writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 2012. Her interests outside of medicine include illustration, writing, singing and playing ukulele, photography, film, food, books, and spending time with loved ones.
Med Student Shadows
As medical students, we shadow physicians to learn about the nature of medicine from them and their patients. In this column, Diem traces her own shadow, preserving and illustrating her experiences--in class, in the hospital, and in between--as a medical student.
