Disability World Featured Artist Now Has Exhibit at Health Museum

In her work, Ferguson, a New York City artist with scoliosis, uses the imagery of her own body and its anatomy to conduct an "artist's inquiry into scoliosis and spinal deformity."

The exhibit features 50 multi-layered paintings based on medical images of the artist's own skeleton, including a 3D spiral CT scan, made in collaboration with orthopedists and radiologists.  The exhibit also includes an array of source materials that invite the viewer to share in the artist's visualization process:  descriptive panels that show how the artworks were made; a photo montage explaining the artist's unique floating-colors process; drawings made from the artist's X-rays; an animation of her 3D scan; a computer display that allows viewers to experience cutting-edge 3D imaging technology; and a short documentary by award-winning filmmaker Peter Barton that takes a behind-the-scenes look at the artist and the making of "The Visible Skeleton Series."

"Throughout history, art has played an important role in our understanding of the human body," says Adrianne Noe, Ph.D., museum director. "Laura Ferguson's work gives visitors a unique and intimate perspective of spinal deformity, while at the same time exploring the emotions that accompany it. The combination of the museum's artifacts and the artist's interpretation of them presents visitors with the rare opportunity to witness the intersection of art and medicine."

Many viewers of Ferguson's work have found her visualizations of altered body structure a powerful means of communication, insight, and healing. For example, Angela B., a scoliosis patient from Colorado, credits Ferguson's work with helping her "see how a body with scoliosis can be beautiful, and to become more accepting of my own body. I could never grasp how beauty could be intertwined with deformity, until I saw your paintings."  Orthopedic surgeons such as Vincent Arlet, M.D., associate editor of "Spinal Deformities: The Comprehensive Text" and director of spinal surgery at McGill University in Montreal, feel that Ferguson's art pays tribute to the orthopedic profession by raising public awareness about spinal deformity. "For us orthopedic surgeons dealing with spinal deformities, your drawings and paintings go deep to our hearts," Arlet says. "Thanks to you, our specialty becomes recognized as an art and not only as pure mechanics."

"My artwork is my visual autobiography," says Ferguson.  "The exhibit shows how new imaging technologies like 3D scans make it possible to see inside the living body with a degree of detail that only dissection allowed before - but it takes an artist's imagination to make the diagnostic data accessible and alive."

She began researching spinal deformities in the early 1990s, and her work is part of the trend to foster medical humanities, to counter medicine's clinical detachment, and to give patients a greater voice.  Early in her research, she found that medical textbooks and journals included mostly radiographic images and photographs of surgeries, which did not give her enough information about the details and texture of the scoliotic spine.

In 2003, Ferguson was invited to Walter Reed Army Medical Center by Dr. David Polly, then chief of Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation, to consult on the Scoliosis Visual Assessment Questionnaire, which was part of a larger study about spinal deformity at the hospital. Dr. Polly was interested in her insights on the visual impact of spinal deformity. While there, Ferguson visited the National Museum of Health and Medicine, where, for the first time, she was able to use real scoliotic specimens as visual aids for her work. During her visit, she made sketches of some of the specimens in the museum's collection. The exhibit includes these abnormal anatomical specimens as well as two of Ferguson's sketches and a finished drawing.

Ferguson's consultation with Dr. Polly at Walter Reed resulted in his contributing to a special feature about "The Visible Skeleton Series" published in John Hopkins' "Perspectives in Biology and Medicine" in spring 2004.

Selected exhibitions of Ferguson's work include: Woodward Gallery, the United Nations, Lincoln Center, Cornell University Medical Library, and Noho Gallery, all in New York City; Penn State University in Hershey, Pa., Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich., the Chicago Cultural Center, Nexus Gallery in Philadelphia, and the Brunnier Art Museum in Ames, Iowa.  Her art was commissioned by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons for their traveling exhibit, "eMotion Pictures: An Exhibition of Orthopedics in Art," which was on display at the museum in 2002, and by the Scoliosis Research Society for the cover of "Spinal Deformities: The Comprehensive Text" in 2003. For information about Ferguson and "The Visible Skeleton Series," visit www.lauraferguson.net.

The four specimens on display from the museum's anatomical collection will complement Ferguson's visualizations by showing the reality of altered body structures. Three of the specimens are scoliotic spines that were purchased by the museum between 1868 and 1916. The fourth specimen, a normal spine, will allow visitors to compare spinal deformity with typical development.

"The severity of the spinal deformities shown in the scoliotic spines must have posed a serious physical problem during life," says Lenore Barbian, curator of the anatomical portion of the exhibit and assistant curator of the museum's anatomical collections. "All four specimens will be a great complement to Ferguson's art, especially because her paintings and drawings explore the connections among normality, abnormality, medicine, and science."

The museum's anatomical collection is comprised of four types of materials: anatomical and pathological skeletal specimens; fluid preserved gross anatomical and pathological specimens; medical research collections containing slides, tissue blocks, and related documentary materials; and miscellaneous material. The anatomical collection also serves as a repository for historical and medically significant specimens, including remains of Lincoln, Booth, and Garfield. This collection provides a rich source of data for researchers in forensic medicine, anthropology, pathology, paleopathology, and military medicine. Since the Civil War, the collection has formed the basis of hundreds of studies by museum staff, AFIP staff, and outside researchers.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine was established in 1862 when U.S. Army Brig. Gen. William Alexander Hammond, the U.S. Army Surgeon General, issued orders that directed all Union Army medical officers "to collect, and to forward to the office of the Surgeon General all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable; together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed, and such other matters as may prove of interest in the study of military medicine or surgery."

Today, the museum is an element of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), a tri-service Army, Navy, and Air Force agency of the Department of Defense with a threefold mission of consultation, education, and research. Within the AFIP there are 22 subspecialty departments with more than 120 pathologists. The board of the AFIP includes the surgeons general of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Public Health Service.

The museum's more than 24 million specimens and artifacts were the first in the country to be registered by the U.S. Department of the Interior as a National Historic Landmark and it is the only museum collection in Washington, D.C. with this status. The Secretary of the Interior, who has designated only 2,340 districts, sites, buildings, and structures for listing in the National Register, selected the museum's collection because of its "exceptional value in commemorating and illustrating the history of the United States."

The museum is open every day except Dec. 25 from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The museum is located at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 6900 Georgia Ave. and Elder Street, NW, Washington, D.C. Docent led tours are offered to walk-in visitors at 1 p.m. on the second and fourth Saturday of each month. The web site is www.nmhm.washingtondc.museum and the telephone number is 202-782-2200. Admission and parking are free.

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