This week I attended the opening of the Illustrating Medicine exhibition at the Loyola campus of Concordia University in Montreal. Curated by Kim Sawchuk and Nancy Marrelli, the show features original work done for the first Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy by medical illustrators Dorothy Foster Chubb, Nancy Joy, Marguerite Drummond, and Elizabeth Blackstock. Not only is the artwork superb, but the curation highlights the drawings’ status as material objects marked by their history–the planning, negotiations, revisions, and transport surrounding the creation of a working illustration. The exhibition runs until May 1, 2014.

The Narrative Bridge conference was a pleasure and an inspiration to attend: excitingly interdisciplinary, refreshingly hands-on, AND held in a city (Charleston, SC) NOT in the grip of sub-sub-zero temperatures. Highlights included: some amateur theatricals (a “reader’s theatre” event, organised by Mahala Yates Stripling, in which a handful of volunteers, myself included, performed a reading of a short play by Richard Selzer); Lauren Mitchell’s meditation on “The Anatomy of Bearing Witness: Surgical Culture, Visual Humility, and Narrative”; and, most movingly, a talk by Shannon Richards-Slaughter entitled “The Hospital and the Blues: ‘St. James Infirmary’ and the Existential Condition of Illness and Death.”