Art captures the medical school experience

First year

What does medical school look like?

To Nicole Nelson it’s a swirling mass of pink and blue cells found in the GI tract painted on a wood panel. It’s black graphite on paper that resembles the image of a mouse embryo. And it’s a pastel drawing of a mother holding her newborn daughter close to her chest moments after a C-section.

It’s all of these things and more to Nelson, a fourth-year medical student at UNMC, who spent part of her four years of medical school studying medical humanities and arts as part of the Enhanced Medical Education Track (EMET).

Second year

“It’s a great creative outlet that allows you to step away from all the studying and stress that comes with medical school and talk about what it means to be a health professional,” Nelson said.

It also turned out to be a way for Nelson, whose undergraduate degree is in studio art, to continue her artistic passion, which is exactly what the medical humanities and arts EMET track is designed to do — allow the students to explore the creative side of medicine.

Third year

Medical humanities and arts is just one of six such tracks offered at UNMC, others include underserved health care, aging and integrative medicine and autoimmune diseases.

Nelson’s art will be on display along with other students’ projects from noon to 2 p.m. today in the Truhlsen Events Center in the Sorrell Center.

Each piece of work represents a year of medical school, Nelson said, from learning about how a healthy body functions to the pathology of disease, to experiencing patients for the first time on clinical rotations to finally deciding on a career. It’s all represented in her art.

“I chose to do the mouse embryo in black and white because during the first year of medical school facts are just pouring into you as you learn how to study and at the same time things are very abstract and foreign with all the new information you encounter,” she said.

With each new year of medical school, Nelson tried to capture what she felt, or was fascinated by or simply wanted to honor.

Like the image of GI tract dysplasia that was so eye catching to Nelson during her second-year pathology class, or the clinical surgical rotation she was humbled to observe, or the birth of her best friend’s baby, Hanna.

Moments now immortalized in her art.