Profs & Pints Baltimore: Medical Illustration's Origins and Evolution
Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Medical Illustration’s Origins and Evolution,” on the past and potential of a rapidly changing artistic profession, with Man-San Ma, Jeni Fairman, and Jeff Day, faculty in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating.]
For centuries, medical illustrators have worked alongside physicians and scientists to distill complex science into clear, compelling visuals. Even today, despite huge advances in photography and computer-generated illustration, we still need people who draw guts for a living.
Learn about the fascinating history and future of medical illustration with three experts from Johns Hopkins, where the profession has deep roots: Jeni Fairman, medical and biological illustrator and most recent past president of the Association of Medical Illustrators; Man-San Ma, who went from explaining medicine to patients to building virtual operating rooms for surgeons; and Dr. Jeff Day, a physician cartoonist turned medical illustrator.
The seed was planted right here in Baltimore with Max Brödel, who helped establish modern medical illustration as a profession at Hopkins more than a century ago. His work went far beyond copying what the eye could see. Through close collaboration with physicians, he transformed complex anatomy and new medical discoveries into images that could teach and advance understanding. Brödel also established the first formal training program for medical illustrators, and his students went on to teach and establish programs across the United States and Canada, helping shape a new profession throughout North America.
From those early foundations, we’ll trace how medical illustration evolved alongside medicine and technology, from hand-rendered techniques such as carbon dust and pen-and-ink to advances in printing, digital illustration, animation, 3D modeling, and interactive media. Each new medium changed not only how medical images were made, but also what they could communicate.
Among the questions the speakers will tackle: What happens now that artificial intelligence can generate an image in seconds? Will AI replace medical illustrators and will anyone still be drawing guts?
We’ll explore how emerging technologies are reshaping the profession and why expertise and human judgement remain as essential as ever to produce scientifically accurate visual storytelling. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)
