Alan Blum
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States

During my internship, residency, and fellowship in the late 1970s, I kept a visual journal, filling several notebooks with patients’ stories, clinical vignettes, snippets of overheard conversations, and sketches. The two collages in this gallery, drawn in my usual medium of black ballpoint pen on small index cards, depict patients I visited at bedside on individual morning rounds. Every face recalls a detail of personality, a conversation, an illness. I sought to capture fleeting patient expressions within the often frightening and isolating worlds of hospitals and clinics.