Looking ahead, Dr. Silver is formulating an idea about creating artwork about head and neck reconstruction once her Mayo residency winds down. “In some ways it’s a very gruesome thing to reconstruct people’s faces; they’re very exposed. You can’t hide a person’s face,” she said. “But I believe it can show the beauty in the work that we do. It’s my hope to get the idea into future pieces.”
Explore This Issue
July 2022Ultimately, art helps Dr. Silver to be a better physician, and that mindset can help turn the ordinary into something that’s perhaps transformative.
“I think, at the end of the day, medicine is art,” she said. “Obviously, you can see how surgery resembles having a canvas laid out as you dissect through things. The creativity it takes to not only interact with people, how to figure out what’s wrong with them, but also to treat them—it takes an artistic brain to think through those things.”
Cheryl Alkon is a freelance medical writer based in Massachusetts.