Repose
Alan Blum
About the artist:Â
Alan Blum is a professor and Gerald Leon Wallace MD Endowed Chair in family medicine at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Tuscaloosa. A self-taught artist, he has published three books of his sketches and stories of patients, and his artworks have appeared in more than a dozen medical journals and textbooks. He is a frequent guest speaker at medical schools in courses in the humanities.
About the artwork:
“From my first year of medical school until the last day of my family medicine residency, I kept a visual diary, filling numerous notebooks with clinical vignettes, stories patients shared with me, scraps of overheard dialogue, and pasted-in sketches of my patients in ballpoint pen on index cards or prescription pads with pharmaceutical advertisements. I made this sketch on one of my visits to the patient’s home, where she had asked to be cared for instead of in the hospital. She died at age 72 less than six months after being diagnosed with an adenocarcinoma of the right lung that grew to occupy » Continue Reading.
