What is Medical Illustration?
How is Medical Illustration different from other fields of illustration? Medical illustration’s unique combination of artistic skill with scientific accuracy and training has helped it to become a field in its own right. Professional medical illustrators are highly trained in both medicine and visual communications, allowing them to represent visually medical and scientific information in way that neither the scientist nor the artist can do on their own. This combination has created a central role for medical illustration in teaching and education. Medical illustration plays a critical role in the day-to-day dialogue in medical, legal, and scientific communities. More specifically, medical illustrators differ from traditional artists in that they spend several years in a specialized degree program at an accredited university taking medical school courses side-by-side with medical students. Medical illustrators take the same lectures, labs and exams, and are graded on the same curve as
