What went wrong…

The Medical Editor on Art

I bet you never wanted to imagine anal surgery, for example,

but I’m here to tell you that the book section on the anus

is somehow the longest part of every textbook.

It just never ends: every time you think you’re done,

there’s another photo, another anus in distress.

I’ve known illustrators with a particular flair

for drawing transvaginal procedures, intricately detailed,

step by horrific step. I want to ask, what went wrong

in art school? How do you choose to sketch intestines

for a living? Have you ever seen a staple gun injury

to the eye? I have, in full color. But eventually

you stop seeing it all as anything more than

Figure 27-3—right up until the guy from marketing

stops by. You talk for ten minutes, only afterward

realizing that on your screen is, yes, a giant anus,

300 dpi. You wonder, was that sexual harassment?

But you never hear anything from HR, so you think

he must not have noticed, but he never stops by again, either.

The ones who get it are the other editors, their screens

also tiled with severed fingers, bacterial infections.

They all went to school for sociology or literature, too,

and somehow ended up here, looking at the torments of the body,

wondering about the limits to what we can endure.

Well this doesn't happen every day. Roxanne Halpine Ward, medical editor extraordinaire, wrote a poem about working with medical illustrators. It was published in the latest edition of The Georgia Review. My dear friend Rob Flewell is the talent behind the transvaginal artwork, and I had the (very large) chapter on anal surgery.

Rob, what the hell happened to us in art school??

To see more of Roxanne's work go check out www.roxannehalpineward.com

And the Georgia Review at www.georgiareview.com

And Rob’s wonderful work at www.anatomybydesign.com