If you’ve ever opened a textbook in science class, you’ve likely witnessed the magic performed by medical illustrators like Hillary Wilson. Hillary’s role requires her to wear two wildly different hats, acting as both artist and scientific expert as she translates complex scientific concepts to the page, crafting graphics both eye-catching and informative. Often, these images shape how we understand and perceive the world around us. With this influence comes a responsibility to illustrate with empathy, accuracy, and diversity in mind.

We sat down with Hillary to learn more about her career path and what it takes to become a great medical illustrator.

How did you learn about medical illustration as a career path and what made you interested in exploring it?

Science and medicine have always been a big part of my life. My mom is a family physician, and there are a good number of doctors in my family. And my mom never dumbed anything down. She would explain things to us so that science was always very attainable. It’s always been a part of how I look at the world. 

Originally, I wanted to go to medical school too. But something didn’t feel quite right with that because art has always been a big way that I define myself too. If I’m not able to do art, I don’t feel like myself. 

In college, I was pre-med and was supposed to graduate early. Then I had a bit of an identity crisis. I was like, I can’t imagine having to put my artistic half so far on the back burner. It just didn’t feel right.

Thankfully, my parents were really supportive. They said, “You could have done it, but we didn’t think you actually wanted to.” 

My uncle knew somebody who was a medical illustrator and showed me that medical illustration was a field that someone could even go into. I ended up pivoting and completing all the requirements to go to one of the grad programs for medical illustration. It was a great way for me to balance two of the ways in which I define myself. 

What was your masters program for medical illustration like?

There are only five accredited masters programs for medical illustration in North America. I happened to go to the Johns Hopkins program. But while each of the programs have slightly different focuses, I think they’re fairly comparable.

Mine was a pretty intense 18 month program. You already had to be very strong in art and science. They didn’t teach you to do the art. You had to submit a portfolio in order to get in. But it started out like medical school. We had anatomy, cadaver dissection, and pathology. Our little cohort of six people often joined classes with students from other programs in the school of medicine. That coursework was heaviest in the first year and obviously super stressful. 

The second year, we reinforced some foundational skills and learned techniques for specific types of medical illustration. For example, we had a sketching and surgical illustration course where we had access to the surgical schedules, scrubs, and could watch the surgeons work. We were able to do autopsies, since seeing fresh, non preserved tissue is different from bodies preserved in anatomical orientation. There was also a class with the aquarium, an animation course, and a class on 3D modeling. It was all a combination of very specific skills with medical and anatomical knowledge. 

In the graphic design portion, there was an important focus on conveying information, especially in relation to accessibility, legibility, and predicting what might make something easier or more difficult to understand.

That sounds like a cool cross-section of different fields! So you would say that it’s really important for medical illustrators to have a strong background in science?

It definitely is! One of the things that people might not realize is how difficult it is to know what you don’t know. It’s difficult to tell whether something is wrong or inaccurate if you haven’t been exposed to it before. You don’t know how to double check things and figure out, okay, is this actually primary information about this topic? Is this a good source? 

So, whether someone takes a more traditional approach and enrolls in one of the programs or not, I think it’s really important to have that scientific background knowledge. One reason I think the grad programs are so important is that, even though they can be a financial burden, you gain exposure to a range of different experiences that require a ton of money, time, and connections that you wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s hard otherwise to get access to surgical schedules and to shadow people. You wouldn’t get to have nurses and attendings explain things to you, or to receive rigorous critiques.

Now that you’re working, what does your day-to-day schedule look like with freelance jobs?

I freelance and do both medical illustration and other types of illustration, which gives me a sense of security because I have multiple, drastically different client pools to pull from. Both types of illustration are important to me because of my personal interests and the things I care about. 

And I have a pretty atypical work schedule. I’m a big morning person, so I usually start working pretty early. I usually have coffee with my fiancé. Then when he goes to work, I’ll get started on whatever I have on my schedule. Because I have an agent, I’m able to spend more time doing very focused work as opposed to getting bogged down in administrative tasks. I really like that flexibility. 

Depending on the day, I might work fewer hours. But it’s the type of thing where I’m sitting there dialed in for five or six hours at a time. I tend to have more intense periods in the spring and in the fall. 

When I have less specific client work, I try to take that opportunity to do more personal projects, especially when it comes to refreshing or expanding my medical or scientific research knowledge. I think it’s really important to cultivate your own sense of curiosity and passion for things.

What would you say is your favorite part of the medical illustration side of your job?

One of the most rewarding parts of my job is taking an amorphous idea with some constraints and thinking, okay, how am I going to filter this through my understanding of what the client needs and my own expertise to come up with something that matches what the client wants and is fun for me as well? 

I really like getting to be creative and problem-solving my way through figuring out what is going to be the most effective and tell the story best. 

Also, because I freelance, I end up getting to work on a lot of different topics, especially with medical illustration. Depending on the client, I can end up working in many different scientific areas.

What factors do you have to consider when illustrating for different audiences? Like patients versus providers, or students versus experts? 

That’s a good question. A lot of it gets at basic empathy. Especially when it comes to illustrating for patients, you have to keep in mind what the average person is going to understand and respond well to. 

If I’m working with a doctor or a medical professional, they can also give useful insights into what they struggle to explain to patients. I can adapt some of those things into my work to make things clearer. 

If I’m illustrating something for a general audience, I might show the work in progress to somebody without my background or medical knowledge to see if they’re able to follow it. You can tell me to draw something, and I know I can do the research to understand and portray it accurately. Not everyone can do that. But on the flipside, you also have to trust people to make certain jumps. 

In contrast, something that’s fun about illustrating for healthcare providers is that you can get into all the juicy details. For example, if you do an illustration of the brain, you need a really high level of knowledge and specificity. Every little divot means something, and you can’t make changes just because it’s pretty. You might end up adding something that looks like pathology, or a tumor. It’s a fascinating challenge to work within the confines of how the human body works. 

Another thing when you have a target audience that knows a lot is that they’re going to notice the little things. You have to really pay attention because if you add something that isn’t supposed to be there, a surgeon will say, “We wouldn’t use that kind of scalpel for this.” Or, “That’s the wrong clip and it should be at this angle.”

You have to be meticulous and direct your audience to what you want them to pay attention to. That can also be true when you ask for feedback. In some cases, you have to ask a medical professional to please disregard certain things in an unfinished work. You have to ask very specific questions, like, “Is this the proper scalpel that you would use? Is this the right kind of tie, or would you cauterize this?” 

How do you tread that line between illustrating something to be factual versus artistic? 

A big thing that I try to do is to humanize people. I tend to err on the side of making things feel less clinical where I can. So if I can draw a more natural pose, I’ll do that rather than using perfect anatomical orientation. I’ve also been a patient, and I’ve had my own issues with the way medical and clinical things can feel. Like, come on, this could have had better vibes. 

I think the fact that I make two very different types of art makes me more aware of how important the human element is. I think there’s something to be said for adding those bits of yourself and what you observe other people responding well to in your medical illustrations for patients, even if it’s not necessarily the perfect, most precise representation. 

Historically, people of color have been excluded from science in much the same way that black and brown bodies have been severely underrepresented in scientific studies and in medical textbooks. How do you promote inclusivity and accessibility through your art?

Sometimes I think there’s an urge to separate the concept of diversity from medicine and science when I don’t think that distinction needs to be made. We want to put confines on the diversity of human beings, like it’s only there for certain contexts. Or act like diversity doesn’t permeate everything, like it’s a topic to layer on top of humanity or on top of science and medicine. 

If you practice medicine or focus on medical science, you’re going to come across a lot of cases. You have to be prepared for diversity to practice the best medicine and to conduct the best science. In my case, if I’m going to be a good medical illustrator, I also need to be able to meet that challenge of creating things for all human beings. 

To me, it’s almost like, why wouldn’t I try to think of the different ways that this might show up on different skin, or how different bodies might respond to something?

That’s how you fully understand something. It’s hard for me to consider having expertise on anything if I haven’t considered those questions. I might not do that in every illustration because you have to be efficient and focus on one particular thing for a single project. But I think it’s important to always have in the back of my mind that there’s so much more to understand and work into what I’m trying to convey. 

You mentioned previously that your mother was a big role model in your life. But are there any other female mentors or mentors of color whom you have looked up to throughout your career journey?

There have been a good number. I think that I’ve been pretty lucky in that, as you said, my mother was a really big role model for me. 

I also have an older sister who I’m really close to. Watching some of the things that she’s experienced has made me even more aware of the need for certain things. My sister has some of the worst eczema I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s been a lifelong struggle to the point where she has to get injections every month. If she isn’t able to do that, her quality of life is extremely low because so much of her skin barrier is disrupted. 

Over time, I’ve observed a lot of her struggles with medicine. On one hand, we have the comfort of our mom being a doctor. But on the other hand, I think almost everybody in my family has had an extremely negative experience with medicine. The fact that my mom was a doctor and could flash her badge made it so that we were treated a little bit more like people. Which is—you know. It is what It is. 

I also had great support in grad school. I had a time when I was really struggling with some things. The Hopkins medical illustration program was intense, and I was maybe the second or third Black woman to go through it. My advisor put me in contact with Dr. Namandje Bumpus on campus. I remember it being so helpful, not because I was experiencing a bunch of blatant racism or something from my classmates. But sometimes you can feel a little bit crazy, especially in a historic institution like Hopkins where they show you the historical stuff. Like beautiful old watercolor illustrations of the fundus of the eye that say something like, “This is from a full blooded n*****.” 

These are little things like that that you get used to. But sometimes, it can be so helpful to have somebody older and more experienced looking out for you. You can go sit in their office for a little bit and talk about how you’re feeling. And they can validate why you’re struggling with the way some situations feel, even though in many cases, things are so shifting and amorphous that it’s easy to write it off as not that bad. So, having Dr. Bumpus there was really helpful. 

I’ve also gotten a lot of great support from other black medical illustrators that I’ve come into contact with. It’s the kind of thing that happens when there are only a few Black people. Like, maybe we can check in on each other and stuff like that. I have one friend that I’ve started coworking with every Thursday over video call. Just to talk and see what we’re each working on. 

Anyway, I feel like having a good support system like that will make or break your mental and emotional health. 

Would you say that’s the main advice you would give to young women, especially young women of color, looking to enter a similar scientific career? To build that kind of support network?

I would say so. I think building a support network is an important thing to draw attention to because you can also get so much conflicting feedback that it can be hard to ground yourself in where you realistically are. 

On one hand, sometimes you receive a lot of praise, like, it’s so great that you’re doing this and that you’re here. But then you also get, but only if you do it the way we want it to be done. 

For example, people might want your opinion about certain things because of who you are. You can start to doubt your own read of situations and even your expertise, or your experience, for things that aren’t related to race. It can almost feel as though you need to be superhuman to have people trust what you have to offer. 

For me, there have also been a couple of times where people acknowledge how good and qualified I am at certain things, but there’s never a budget for it. If it’s so important and you’re truly blown away by my work, there should be money for it. 

I think that having the support of people experiencing some of these same overt things that can make you gaslight yourself or doubt your own read on how well you’re doing or how good your work is is so important. It can really boost you up and help ground you. Sometimes, you just need someone to be like, “Hey, it’s okay. You’re fine. Sometimes this is just what happens. And, we can’t necessarily do anything about it right now, but we both know that this is what’s happening.” 

I think that can be really helpful. 

And finally, are there any fun facts you’d like to share about your life outside work?

I’m obsessed with gardening!

Want to find out more about Hillary and her art?

Find her on Instagram @hillarydwilsonart. She also has a website for her medical illustration and a second general art website. Both are amazing and intensely scroll-able. Go check them out!