Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists

'One picture is worth more than a thousand words'. A medical artist should always consider an illustration with this in mind. Unlike the brilliant illustrators of Dickens's novels, who needed to portray larger than life characters, a medical illustrator has to portray small, often complex structures, which may never be seen in the way it is illustrated, something a photograph could never achieve. Perhaps this is why photographic illustration still plays a relatively small role in medical publishing. A carefully planned and well-executed illustration remains a useful and often the key feature of modern textbooks. The beginnings of medical illustration are lost in antiquity. Presumably, the paucity of anatomical information in medical practice meant that there was little to illustrate. There probably were illustrated texts but none has survived. The wood-cuts prior to Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical studies and drawings were speculative rather than informative, making the truly amazing work of this genius even more impressive, but sadly they were never seen in his lifetime. There is considerable controversy over how much dissection Leonardo actually did himself and a strong suspicion emerges from the rarity of his illustrations of the brain and spinal cord that he had little knowledge of nervous structures. The only exception was his repeated attempts to illustrate the brachial plexus over a period of 10 years. His best attempt clearly shows five roots, including T1 and a passable drawing of the brachial plexus, spoiled by the failure to recognize the minor local branches as separate entities. It is, however, anatomically better than the illustrations of Vesalius, 50 years later. Leonardo seemed initially to accept the medieval doctrine that the cavities of the brain were more significant than brain substance and drew three identically sized circular cavities within the brain in a line. In a later drawing, he showed the anterior horns as a single mid-line structure and only identified the posterior horns as paired. His third ventricle appeared to drain into the interpedunculur cistern. This is an area that remains very difficult to show and illustrate. His illustrations of the musculature of the arms and legs are masterpieces in their own right—still entirely suitable for use in modern textbooks. His technique consisted of the use of silverpoint (a stick made of an alloy of lead and tin), which produces a fine black line (the forerunner of the modern graphite pencil) and a combination of black and …