It could be worth mentioning we felt a lot of this feeling came from not being able to socialise and properly meet each other. One of our GPs has mentioned she feels a lot of dementia cases she has seen since the start of the pandemic have been due to reduced social interaction and we anticipated that this sense of lack would lead to disjointedness in the final piece….
Hence, we sought to visualise these feelings, we all designed a section of the brain independently and collated it to create the final piece. However, when viewed as a whole, the piece comes together as an image of the brain – portraying the resilience and cohesion of the medical community and how it all quite literally ‘comes together in the end’.
We wanted to show the adaptability of the brain in these situations also – as demonstrated by the resilient health care professionals we have been fortunate enough to meet so far and I think this is mirrored by the bright colours in the piece.
In creating our piece, we were also able to reflect on the aspect of medicine that is often overlooked; medicine is an art as much as a science. Despite coming together to collaborate on this piece, all our distinct experiences of medicine, university, and life led us to create varied responses to the same subject matter.
Similarly, as a cohort we will all have had individual experiences that will inform how we practice medicine. It is this personal element of experience that transforms medicine from a plain science to a reflective and unique art.
Megs Allen, Connie Campbell- Gray, Emily Morgan, Ethan Willott, Holly Luscombe, Ilana Goldstein, Katy Betts, Serena Manchip, Steph Palmer, Thea Thompson, Tristan Best and William Barclay.
I really like how this captures the feeling of studying during a pandemic. Although my cohort has been lucky enough to start in person during lockdown the only option for connection was zoom creating a sense of disjointedness shown by the individual design of each portion of the brain. The background of each portion also shows different things like birthdays and travel that we couldn’t do at the height of the pandemic and how we thought about them.
As an individual who did not experience medical school learning online, but rather GCSE learning on line during COVID, I think that this piece is a great portrayal of what it was like to attend isolated teaching. Learning from home in such a formative time in your life, and having to navigate that alone, is a complicated and overwhelming feeling and I think the artwork portrays so much of not only having to learn from home, but having to experience family and friend relationships through a screen and not being able to reach or visit loved ones. This is something that I think would be especially difficult when attending medical school as a first year or even a frontline professional in the pandemic .