WHY SURGEONS SHOULD LEARN TO DRAW

Professional stories can often be boring for people, so it might be nice to change the pace a bit with stories related to the practice of our profession to help you understand a little more about surgery.

A question that seems completely unrelated to the field: why should surgeons learn how to draw? To answer this question, the doctor would like to tell two stories.

Back in my first year of medical school (known colloquially by medical students as the 'mosquito' year), the subject that interested me the most was anatomy. Human anatomy is an extremely important and fundamental subject for medical students. Back in the day, when modern technology was not yet developed, the only way to teach anatomy was by drawing. If you are a medical student, you are undoubtedly very familiar with the Atlas compiled by the American surgeon and artist Frank H. Netter. He is called the 'Michelangelo of Medicine' with more than 4,000 illustrative works. The way anatomy was taught was also very cool: no lesson plans, no textbooks, just a box of colored chalk. Drawing while lecturing, at the end of the class, the blackboard looked no different than a work of art. A teaching method that, in my personal opinion, was both easy to understand and top-notch.

In 2013, upon hearing the news that I had passed the surgical residency entrance exam, my mother called to inform Professor Trịnh Hồng Sơn and asked him to mentor me. At around 8 PM, he told my mother: 'Tell him to come over right now.' So I clumsily caught a ride and went to assist him in surgeries all night long. The first lesson was drawing the intraoperative protocol diagram describing the lesion and the surgical management. I still remember it vividly; as he spoke, he drew: 'Now, starting from the esophagus, stomach, duodenum…' A very basic lesson. A surgeon must be able to describe the lesion and how the procedure was performed in a simple and understandable manner on the operative report.

Nowadays, this matter seems to be taken lightly, and I often feel dissatisfied when seeing surgical residents draw poorly or incomprehensibly in their assistance notes. To me, when a surgical resident can accurately draw what was done, it means they truly understand the technique. Drawing accurately is very important; furthermore, if possible, try to draw a bit neatly. In the Vietnamese word for 'doctor' (bác sỹ), there is the character 'sỹ' (scholar/gentleman), and in a sense, a surgeon can also be considered an artist—one who repairs and creates 'works of art' on the human body. That work must naturally be beautiful, and drawing the operative report diagram is like your signature or logo on that masterpiece, so there is no reason to sign poorly on your own creation. Looking at how a protocol is drawn, I can sometimes sense their seriousness toward the profession. Even as modern technology advances and pre-printed templates exist, personally, hand-drawing diagrams remains very important and always carries a very distinct and personalized hallmark of each individual surgeon.

I don't dare claim to draw beautifully, but perhaps it is at least easy to understand.

Image: Some illustrative drawings posted by doctors in the operating room to guide residents