Alan Blum
About the artist:
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. Many of his sketches have appeared in Pulse. 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. This is one of the sketches from more than seventy binders I have filled throughout my career.”
Visuals editor:
Sara Kohrt
