Medical illustrators see computer
bring major change to their field

Yet even da Vinci would be hustling to keep up with the changes occuring in this field today. Medical illustrations no longer are used just in textbooks and no longer are done just by hand.
The work is showing up in magazines, healthinformation pamphlets, advertisements and as teaching aids in medical, dental and veterinary schools, says Glen Hintz, a Rochester Institute of Technology assistant professor who is a key mentor along with Bob Wabnitz in the medical illustration program at RIT.
Medical illustration also has its days in court.
In addition to normal field trips to hospitals to view and sketch operations, Hintz now takes his students on field trips to courtrooms as well.
“We were in a courtroom not long ago observing a malpractice case,” Hintz says. “They were talking about a situa- tion where a woman had passed away and the husband and his lawyer were claiming a doctor had misidentified a lump on the woman’s breast.
“Lo and behold, there on an easel was a poster I had done for a medical client on breast examination. They were using it to explain to the jury the anatomy involved in the case.”
Laurie Maynard, media relations manager at RIT, says the school leads the way in educating medical illustrators whose work is used in recreating injury and accident scenes.
“Four recent RIT medical illustration alumnus have gone to Atlanta, Ga., towork for Medical Legal Illustrations Inc.,” Maynard says. “There they have done such things as depict injuries resulting from a boiler explosion, a nail gun accident, botched abortions and people falling.”
Another major change is how the images are created. In years past, medical illustrators mainly worked on paper or posterboards.
“We have entered the computer age,” Hintz says. “A lot of new important work is being done on disks, videotape and other forms of electronic media.”
Brian Wilson is a 1989 RIT graduate who works at Medical Legal Illustrations.
“We create 3-D models and computer animation as well as the standard 30-by- 40-inch posterboard illustrations for legal purposes,” he says. “It depends on the lawyer’s style. We scan our drawings into computers a lot of the time to manipulate and reproduce images more easily.”
Wilson also notes the work of a new company called ADAM Software. ADAM stands for Animated Dissection of Anatomy for Medicine. Products include a library of computer-enhanced, anatomically correct drawings of various layers of the human body. These drawings are made available for reuse via videotape and/or software.
“The demand for ADAM has grown to international levels,” he says.
The Association of Medical Illustrators notes that three schools teach medical illustration at the undergraduate level in the United States: Johns Hopkins University, Ohio State University and RIT. Six or seven programs exist on the graduate level. Among these are Medical College of Georgia, University of Illinois, Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan, University of Texas at Dallas and RIT.
Some medical illustrators are part of multimedia departments, according to the association. A large number, however, have set up small companies designed to provide illustration services to their various targeted markets.
Medical illustrators can be found in such diverse locations as the Hospital for Joint Disease in New York City, Boston University Medical Center, Gower Medical Publications, the Smithsonian Institution and in the neuroanatomy department at University of California, Los Angeles.
Hintz notes that the employment outlook for medical illustrators generally is good, although he estimates that it takes four to six months for a graduate to find a job. Some start out only working part time.
“That’s pretty normal for those beginning visual arts careers these days,” he says.
The outlook is decent for these graduates, Hintz adds, because they are relatively few in number. RIT graduates some 18 a year.
Then there are those medical illustrators who have gone on to other things, from more generalized illustration work to becoming pharmaceutical sales people or even attending medical school.
Karen Varecka-Ver Steeg, one of two art directors at the communications firm Saphar & Associates Inc., holds a bachelor’s in fine arts degree from the medical illustration department at RIT.
Upon graduation in 1986, Ver Steeg concentrated on creating medical illustrations as a free-lancer. Then she began shifting into business-oriented illustrations.
At Saphar, Ver Steeg has become even more generalized.
“Because Saphar is a small firm,” said Ver Steeg, “the art directors get to do a little of everything, from concept and design to layout and execution to production. Very little of what we do involves medical illustrations.”
Still, Ver Steeg attributes her success to her medical illustration background.
“It’s a very well-rounded program at RIT,” she says. “You have to be a really top-notch illustrator and drawer. I was also exposed to photography, graphic design, biology, art history … a lot of different things that made it easier to market myself. And the computer training has proven invaluable.”
So, what does the future hold for medical illustrators?
Hintz himself has electronically created a Supercard stack of images of “slices” of the human body.
“I scanned some 36 cadaver sections (encased in plastic) into the computer. After enhancement, I then used these illustrations to compare gross anatomical information with sonograms (images resulting from a testing procedure involving sound waves instead of X- rays) of the same body area,” Hintz says. “You click on a human figure in the computer and see either a cadaver section, a sonogram or both,” Hintz says, noting both windows can be open on the computer screen simultaneously.
“I’m still working on it, but it could be a very useful teaching tool,” Hintz says.
Da Vinci would be impressed.
(James Albright is a Rochester-area free-lance writer.)