Blog Article
Posted on April 28th, 2012 in
Plastic Surgeon
Plastic surgery is often described as an art, but can the development of traditional artistic techniques help plastic surgeons to produce better results? A group of plastic surgeons and medical students at the University of Lincoln in the UK are finding out in a course called the Art of Reconstruction. Now entering its second year, the course offers training in drawing and clay sculpture to promote better results during plastic and
reconstructive surgeries.
According to
BBC News, the course offers training in different approaches, including self-portraiture, life drawing, and clay modeling. The focus of the course centers on surgical applications of these techniques, so that drawings and models of the head, neck, and breast are featured.
This often involves some unusual tasks. For instance, some students use mirrors to draw self-portraits, but break their face into four quarters in order to create four separate drawings. They must combine and reposition these drawings in order to re-create their balanced face. In another task, students use clay to build a breast onto a cast of a female chest from which one breast is missing.
Emma Caroline Fernandez, a medical student from Debrecen, Hungary, says that the courses helped her to judge the proportion and size of the breast in a whole new way:
“Yesterday we did clay modelling and I thought I’d done a good job until I turned around, I went around the side, as mostly artists do, and then I noticed a huge gap. With the nose and the lips if you look from the front you can’t really judge the space between, until you look from another perspective.”
As a result of practicing these artistic techniques, many of the surgeons have adapted their surgical approaches. By adapting the light in the operating room, or looking at the breasts from different angles, they can get a new perspective on surgeries such as rhinoplasty and
breast augmentation.
(Image source: Jastrow,
Wikimedia Commons)
