I started college at seventeen, knowing I wanted to be a doctor. I’m originally from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but I yearned to explore a place vastly different than where I grew up, and that’s how I ended up at Tulane University, in New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans is a bright, bold, and loud place, and I thrived there. As I studied, I was inspired by those bright bold colors of the city, and began DRAWING to reflect what I saw around me. I incorporated those colors into my notes for my premed classes; benzene rings with vibrant reds and blues, biochemical pathways with neon pinks and oranges, and physics schematics in the gold, purple, and green of Mardi Gras. It was during that time that I realized I was a visual learner, and that my brain studied best through drawing.

I returned to New England to study medicine, and found the curriculum so much more difficult to engage with than my time as an undergraduate. I couldn’t figure out how to study. I would attend lectures and try desperately to scribble down notes as the professors taught, but couldn’t seem to retain any of the information in front of me. I had the hardest time studying human anatomy; listening to descriptions of the human body wasn’t enough for me to understand it. I then decided to return to my roots, to the method of learning that had worked so well for me in the past. I stopped going to lectures, and instead would spend hours and hours at the library, pouring over books and atlases and creating my own bright and bold images that represented the subject matter. And with that, Hanson’s Anatomy was born.

I regained my love of learning, and I began to excel in my coursework. I continued to create and began to share my work on social media. Through these online platforms, I met thousands of other students who, like me, realized that they too best learned through visual mediums. Traditional medical school education is not for everyone, and by introducing my method of visual learning with the world, many others sent me messages saying my work inspired them to start learning through artwork as well.

During my clinical years in medical school, once I had passed my first two steps of the USMLE (United States Medical Licensing Examination), I began to paint. I took anatomical concepts that I had spent the previous two years meticulously drawing, and began to express them with acrylics on canvas. I rekindled my love of art and my love of anatomy, and continued to share my work with a wide reaching audience online.

After medical school I entered a dual residency program in Emergency Medicine and Internal Medicine in Philadelphia, PA. While I found myself with much less free time for creating than I had previously known, my co-residents and co-workers were incredibly supportive of my way of learning, and of my art. It was during this time that my husband and I self-published my book, Hanson’s Anatomy, The Complete Book, and began to sell online. The book consisted of all of the notes I had made during my time in medical school to study for the USMLE, and it became wildly successful. Again, I found myself meeting people from all over the world who could relate to visual note taking, and who were inspired by my work. During my time in residency I also began to experiment with painting portraits as well as more abstract images of the human body.

I stayed in Philadelphia for an additional year to complete a fellowship in Critical Care Medicine, where I had found my niche. I had worked through the pandemic in an extremely busy ICU, and I found that I loved the acuity, the procedures, and relationships with patients and families that I could build during a patient’s stay in our unit. Critical Care Medicine encompassed the things I loved about both Emergency Medicine and Internal Medicine, and with the support of my mentors and my colleagues I developed my passion for the specialty.

I just moved back to my home town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to begin a career as an Attending Physician. I’m excited for this next chapter, to teach new residents about my specialty, to continue to share my style of visual learning with new students, and to get back to the drawing board myself, to create new work.

Find Dr. Hanson’s artwork & medical school notes here! 

Click here to find the digital print version of this article on Issu.com