Vanitas

I rotated through the ICU in April and when I saw the question associated with the theme, "how has the process of healthcare training changed you?", I reflected on my training and thought about how medical school has made me more aware of life's fragility and lability. In the ICU, I confronted death on a daily basis while the team worked to keep patients alive, sometimes by a thread. 

I love art history and one of my favorite genres is vanitas. I felt creating my own would capture my feelings perfectly - it's an in-your-face and unapologetic reminder of mortality. I decided to update it a little bit by creating it digitally and swap out the knocked over chalice of wine with a coffee mug.

Artist: Dana Feldman, MS3 at the University of Michigan Medical School