The research continues…..
I suffered a medium-sized panic last week while surfing "medical humanities" – its' proponents seem to have carved out a real niche for themselves, and while it's great that there's a journal and a proper discipline to the study it makes it a bit forbidding for "outsiders". I don't have a qualification in Medical Humanities; there are lots of people out there who have degrees in the subject (I know some of them); am I poaching on their territory? etc etc. But calm down – what I'm actually being asked to do is to teach a drawing-based module to medical students, I can certainly do that and I wouldn't have been asked if I wasn't thought to be up to it (would I?….here we go again..)
Had a lovely talk on Wednesday with my old tutor from art school: she's very supportive and has made several very helpful suggestions. On her advice I have downloaded the QAA benchmark on fine art teaching – it looks surprisingly approachable, but then I haven't read all of it yet. She reminisced about doing life drawing with a 4H pencil – don't fancy it myself. Henry Tonks was keen on it too, and he was a surgeon as well as professor at the Slade. Now here's a whole topic on its' own: medics as illustrators: name doctors who were also artists, artists who were anatomists, etc etc.
