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Art of Medicine

Twenty-Twenty Surgery

Oil on canvas, 30 inches by 40 inches
By Nicola Quatrano ('13)

Science and the arts are not mutually exclusive, says Nicola Quatrano, a fourth-year medical student. In fact, her passion for the arts has helped her in all of her endeavors. "Without art, I would have never been able to accomplish anything that I have in my academics, in athletics, and in my life," she says. "It has such an integral role in everything that I do. It shaped me as a person, as an athlete, a medical student, and I'm sure as a physician as well." Quatrano has been immersed in the arts since she could hold a pencil. Her love of art and her knack for science confused people at times, and she remembers being told that art and science were governed by different sides of the brain. Though art school was not in her plans, Quatrano found a way to combine the two worlds. She graduated from Boston College in 2008, where she majored in biochemistry and minored in studio art.

Twenty-Twenty Surgery is an abstract depiction of what goes on in an operating room. It was inspired by displays at a botanical museum and explores a theme of "unveiling." "The person seeing the painting is looking through [a] pattern and seeing the surgeons intently working . . . and how the people are there, their insides exposed," she says. It combines two worlds for her, "my artistic world and my science [or] medical world." Her work, she finds, is about "bringing those two worlds together."


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Geisel School of Medicine at DartmouthDartmouth-Hitchcock Medical CenterWhite River Junction VAMCNorris Cotton Cancer CenterDartmouth College