Any similarity between art and surgery?

Orthopedic surgery and art are more alike than they are different, from process point of view. In almost every field, each time a discovery is made, it affects the future of the field, even in art. It advances on the shoulders of those who precede us. Further the mental focus of both surgeon and artist is completely exclusive of all else but the operation or painting in progress. Both tasks are “internally” consuming and tend to exclude verbal intrusions from either an operating room staff or the surrounding painters and friends. Of course, some content laden statements do leak through to the brains of each. For instance, the sentence, “Doc, we’ve got a problem,” from the anesthesiologist passes right through the creative wall. So would a phrase like, “It doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to put out this fire in the living room, man, I think you might want to grab your brushes and step outside,” reach the consciousness of the artist.

In surgery there are novice steps to learn, like how to tie a knot while wearing two pairs of wet, rubber gloves, with your hands in a deep hole, how to maintain sterile technique, the names of the instruments, how to stop the bleeding, and how to ignore the unwelcome comments from others during training.

Artists learn about colors, value, colors, perspective, colors, so-called empty space, colors, brush strokes, colors, when to turn the canvas on its side to draw a line, how to paint what you see, colors, and how to paint what you want to see. After five or ten years of experience in both professions, however, the approach to the “job” changes. There are no more individual steps in a painting or a surgery.

For instance, after ten years, the orthopedist no longer thinks about the 36 steps required to perform a total hip replacement. Instead he or she pictures the patient walking after surgery. That “picture” includes reflecting on whether to lengthen the leg, increasing a hip rotation for inactive patients who primarily sit, or noting the bone quality which determines whether the prosthesis is implanted with or without cement. However, stepwise thinking no longer occurs, and most of the time the doc does not even know what his hands are doing throughout an operation. The passage of time goes entirely unnoticed. The “fine art” product for an orthopedist is an x-ray, a two-dimensional art form just like for the artist.