I painted this acrylic painting whilst at Medical School. The title ‘The patient examines the doctor’, is also the title of a chapter in the book ‘Intoxicated by my illness’ by Anatole Broyard. The book is a moving and witty personal exploration of illness and mortality, and in that chapter the author explores what he looks for in, and wants from, a doctor.

Two passages in the chapter that resonated most for me were:

“To the typical physician, my illness is a routine incident in his rounds, while for me it's the crisis of my life. I would feel better if I had a doctor who, at least, perceived this incongruity.”

“…whether he wants to be or not, the doctor is a storyteller, and he can turn our lives into good or bad stories, regardless of the diagnosis…”

The patient is depicted examining the doctor by auscultating his head, which is a metaphor for the patient wondering ‘what is he thinking?’ ‘does he know what he is looking for?’ ‘if there is something to find will he find it?’

The two figures in the painting are squeezed into the composition so as to represent the intimacy of the interaction. I tried to depict them so that they looked like the same person, which was meant to represent the idea that the doctor could easily be the patient, we are all a patient at some point in our life. I muted the colours, and faded out the outer part of the painting so that the viewer’s eye is drawn to the two central arms, which are almost entwined. I allowed drip marks towards the bottom, which are a metaphor for the impermanence of human life, and it’s unravelling when there is illness. The patient is coming to the doctor because he is ill, once the doctor diagnoses the illness this resets the time parameters of the patient’s life.

The composition nods to Escher’s lithograph, ‘Drawing Hands’, which is an example of what Douglas Hofstadter describes as a ‘strange loop’2, where hierarchy is "tangled”, “a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop”2. Usually a painting is read from left to right, like a book. The doctor is to the left, he is listening intently to his stethoscope, we follow the doctor’s arm which reaches towards the patient on the right. We look up at the patient’s face, he is also concentrating intently on his own subject - the doctor. We follow the patient’s arm back to the doctor and so the visual loop continues.

The painting won The Roy Alexander Briggs Prize, and is currently hanging in the Student Support Office at Barts and The London Medical and Dentistry School.