This piece represents our experience of starting medical school, reflecting on the unique year we’ve had adapting to Covid-19. Often, we’ve felt as a group, that navigating online learning can be confusing, challenging and that there is sometimes a sense of something being amiss – we didn’t know what it would have been like in more ‘normal’ years.
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.