1113. A Day in the Life: What’s It Really Like to Be a Medical Legal Illustrator?

“I had been working as a medical illustrator in my first job at a company called MLI: Medical Legal Illustration, recreating illustrations of injuries usually from car accidents or so called slip and fall accidents so that a jury can understand what physically happened to people in those accidents. Because of my educational background and long-standing passion for the work, I was thriving. After three years we had a big shake up in the company that led to a contract dispute. I decided that it was time to go out on my own at the age of 28 and have been running Medical Visions Inc. for over 30 years creating over 15,000 custom medical legal illustrations for clients across the country. You can’t just have a degree in art to be a medical illustrator. You have to have half art and half science. And that’s difficult because a lot of artists don’t like math or science. We don’t like the technical aspect of things. And a lot of scientists have problems with visual communication. So we’re kind of a rare breed because we’ve got to be good at both.”

Elizabeth Shick graduated summa cum laude from the University of Georgia with a degree in Scientific Illustration, then went on to study Medical Illustration at the Medical College of Georgia. She was the senior medical illustrator at MLI before opening her own company, Medical Visions, Inc., in 1991. She is one of the top medical legal illustrators in the country with extensive experience, personally producing over 15,000 exhibits. Elizabeth’s motto is “Do what you love and delegate everything else.”