Although much of our current medical education is focused on disease (which is concerned with pathology), we end up spending less time learning about illness — the subjective experience of health and disease. I was interested in deepening my understanding of illness and began a project to explore this further. As part of the curriculum at the University of British Columbia, medical students are given the opportunity to pursue a self-directed scholarly project. This can be in the form of research, community outreach or creative endeavours. The aim of my project was to build authentic reflective and empathic skills, explore the concept of illness, and spark dialogue on the value of arts and humanities in medical education. To do so, I read memoirs on illness, as these first-person accounts bring me closer to the experience of illness through storytelling. I then drew on themes and messages that struck me in my reading to create an artwork for each memoir. This creative process was a course of reflection and synthesis, an attempt to better understand and deeply empathize with the patients’ lived experiences.

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