Scott Barrows
Biomedical Visualization
In the campy, 1965 movie based on Isaac Asimov’s “The Fantastic Voyage” — the original inner-space, honey-I-shrunk-the-doctors adventure — a microbe-size surgical team navigates a miniature submarine through the body of a brilliant scientist who could save the world — that is, if he weren’t inconvenienced by a coma.
During a psychedelic voyage to save his life, the crew pilots the submarine Proteus through the bloodstream, battles white blood cells, watches antibodies trap ferocious bacteria, barely escapes the left ventricle with their lives — and, by the end of the voyage, views the human body with a new sense of awe and mystery.
Scott Thorn Barrows would have loved the trip.
One of the world’s best-known medical illustrators, Barrows is a professor and director of the prestigious Biomedical Visualization graduate program at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center. He creates the kind of art the Proteus crew could only have dreamed of: stunning, real-world medical art illustrating everything from the molecular behavior of a drug to the history of the treatment of a disease.
A Molecular View
Barrows’ work has graced the walls of the world’s most prestigious galleries and museums. It also appears in the pages of publications such as National Geographic, U.S. News & World Report, World Book Encyclopedia and hundreds of surgical textbooks and medical journals.
Where the Proteus crew explored a fictional human body by submarine, though, Barrows explores the human body by Mac.
Mixing Science and Art
“Although the techniques and technology for medical illustration have changed,” Barrows says from his office on the UIC campus, “the creativity and the requirements have not. Medical science has always been taught visually. Doctors still need books illustrated, and every new surgical procedure needs to be illustrated. Scientists studying how to cure a disease or kill a tumor need to see how drugs might sneak across a cell membrane and change its function.
“Although the techniques and technology for medical illustration have changed, the creativity and the requirements have not. Medical science has always been taught visually.”
“Starting with Leonardo da Vinci,” Barrows elaborates, “everything was taught by original art from very few dissections, usually posters. Some were good; most were not. Then, with the printing press, people began to use illustrated books to teach medicine and anatomy.
“The newest renaissance came about with Apple computers. Apple took computer technology that was limited to business and government and made it accessible to artists. I’m sure the digital renaissance would have happened eventually, but that gave new tools to a group that no one had really thought much about, because artists and ‘creatives’ were not real high on the technology food chain.”
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