Patients come to a physician to be seen, and they probably share the physician’s belief in the power of the objective, scientific gaze. We show and tell our doctors things we would show or tell to none but our most intimate friends, family, and lovers because we believe that we are in a safe place and hope that, in being seen, we will be healed.
Alan Blum is a physician who sees “events for art” in his patients individual personalities—who act in a human drama of courage, despair, humor, pettiness, suffering, and death. Blum has sketched patients since he was a resident in the late seventies, and he uses his sketches to learn something beyond the compass of technological medicine.
Blum draws to learn more about his patients and to fix them in his mind. When, for example, he looks at an old sketch of a long-dead patient, he revives that patient in his imagination. In doing so, he tacitly responds to the tradition of portraiture in Western history. The portrait, after all, is the product of individualist sensibility, and the genre was created to memorialize the person over distance and time— even beyond death.
Alan Blum’s sketches are one medical practitioner’s response to the fragmentation and disintegration of a long tradition of observation. Through his sketches, with their scraps of dialogue, Blum has reconciled two kinds of knowledge that have long been separated: the powerful and objective knowledge made possible by imaging technology, and the artist’s knowledge of a person as individual and whole.
– From “Seeing Patients” by Mary Winkler, Literature and Medicine.
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