

In India, dance is a big part of everyday life, both informal and formal, Maitra says, so it was just a natural extension for her to use her skills in traditional Indian dance to reach out to her research participants. She has since spent 16 months conducting research in India, where dance has played a key role in helping her to connect with and help heal abused women. Her MedScholars project entailed developing and implementing a domestic violence screening tool in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It permits a different kind of expression than oral narrative.”Ī native of Kolkata, Maitra studied history and literature as an undergraduate at Harvard University, always knowing she wanted to be a physician. I see how it shapes my approaches as a physician. “It’s a way of seeing and being in the world. “Dance is a thread that has always been there,” says Maitra. Like other medical students passionate about the arts, Maitra has woven her talent together with her skills as a writer, researcher and health care provider into a pattern that she believes will best lead to the healing of others. It continues to be so now, both as a medical student treating patients and as a PhD student studying domestic violence in India. Indian dance has been a part of Maitra’s life since she was a little girl studying the classical form known as Bharatanatyam. Movement equalized us we found harmony in beats, steps and silence.” “Through dance, I formed attachments with the women, across steep barriers of class and cultural difference. In writing about the experience, she explains how dance enabled her to connect with her research participants. The goal of her research, conducted in this shelter, was to explore experiences of domestic violence among poor and marginalized women in Kolkata. Morning after morning, these women who had escaped from violent homes, ending up first on the streets, then in the shelter, would find momentary comfort and healing through dance, Maitra says. In any case, I hope that my work will help people learn more about biomedicine.” “I’ve long been interested in the pop art movement, but I’m probably more of a science nerd at heart.

“I like hiding things in all my projects,” Love says. And closer still, into the background where tiny Zanzibar maps float in space next to tiny floating faces, facial nerve branches sketched in. Peer closely into the illustrated mnemonic for branches of the facial nerve: to Zanzibar by motor car, please! Then peer more closely at the words for the facial nerve branches, temporal, zygomatic, buccal, maxillary, carotid, posterior auricular, all illustrated with rainbow-colored Hot Wheels cars. Visualizing these mnemonics could only help the memorization process, he figured. He drew each one as a story within a story within a story that illustrates practical applications of anatomy. Love chose 16 of his favorite mnemonics - most from his anatomy instructors, a few found online. White-coated instructors would scrawl mnemonics across these same whiteboards, sing-songing the funny-bone-tickling memory devices for the edification of medical students. The anatomy lab is where inspiration struck Love, as a first-year medical student. And tiny toilet-sitting versions of Rodin’s The Thinker contemplate the rotator cuff muscles of the mnemonic SITS: supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor, subscapularis. There are Andy Warhol-inspired Campbell’s-style soup cans that spell out the branches of the descending aorta: celiac trunk, superior mesenteric, renal artery, gonadal artery, inferior mesenteric, common iliac (canned soup, really good in cans). Sixteen Anatomic Mnemonics is decorated with brightly colored illustrations of 16 medical mnemonics, the whimsical expressions that share the same initial letters as the lists of body parts medical students must memorize. “I like to give a one-off artistic feel to the piece,” says Love, a medical student who has already earned a PhD in developmental biology, as he dabs short brushstrokes of white paint into the spaces between the 16 boxed illustrations on the poster board. To each version he likes to add touches of something new. It exists in various forms: online, as a book and, now, as a poster.

Sixteen Anatomic Mnemonics is an illustration that both entertains and serves as a memory aid.
Adding music midico software#
Love has drawn upon his skills as a graphic artist and former medical illustrator - using graphic design software combined with hand-painted splashes of color - to create a work of art as his MedScholars Project. The tall, fast-talking, blue-scrubs-wearing Nick Love leans closely into the whiteboard in Stanford’s clinical anatomy dissection lab, where he’s hung a poster-sized rendition of his multimedia illustration, titled Sixteen Anatomic Mnemonics.
