“I’VE done everything from astronomy through to dinosaurs,” says Debbie Maizels, a freelance biological and medical illustrator. She is perched on a stool in her home office, surrounded by books on anatomy, computer screens — one with a fairly gruesome illustration of an eyelift on it — sketches and a skeleton.

Maizels, who has been a medical artist since 1994, does a wide variety of work, from illustrating school textbooks and complex presentations of academic information to forensic work. “Anything that might need an illustration about medical sciences, that’ll be us,” she says of her profession.

Artists also undertake facial reconstructions, which can be used to identify victims or to see how missing people may have aged, and work alongside criminal lawyers.

At the beginning of the year, Maizels worked on presenting evidence at the trial of the suspects accused of killing PC Sharon Beshenivsky in Bradford in 2005.

“We were presented with the pathologist’s report in very specific language and the witness statement of PC Milburn, who was standing behind PC Beshenivsky,” she says. The simple black and white line drawing she and her colleague produced showed the trajectory of the bullet clearly to the jury and proved that the person accused of firing the shot couldn’t have done so.

Maizels completed a degree in botany and zoology followed by a BA in scientific illustration at Middlesex University. Having a science background has been immensely helpful in her career, she says. “With anatomy, for example, medics will present you with some rough [sketches] and expect you to turn it into something that’s understandable to anybody. And it can be a really terrible scribble.”

Her current projects include a series of illustrations for a pharmacology textbook for Norwegian nurses. One of the drawings for it is a simple diagram that uses a flow chart to show different ways of introducing medicine into the body. Simple, that is, apart from the language barrier. “I’ve had to get hold of Norwegian medical dictionaries to translate,” Maizels says.

The work of a medical illustrator is akin to that of a communicator. Complex scientific ideas have to be put into a form that the general public or students can understand.

“This is detailed work. It’s gastric anatomy but it’s for student nurses who may be 18 or 19 years old coming straight from school. So you’ve got to make it interesting and appealing for them to remember.”

So is it art or science? “It’s functional art,” she says. Take the example of plant cell structure. “It looks like something out of science fiction. You can see the cellular structure only under an electron micrograph, and then all you can see is grey splodges. But that is so frequently interpreted at all levels for schoolchildren right up to scientific papers.”

Another recent interpretation that she has worked on is a facial reconstruction of the oldest fossil man that has been found to date.

Toumaï, discovered in Chad in 2001, is estimated to be between six and seven million years old. And the state of his skull doesn’t tell us very much. “I had to come up with something that is as near as possible to the original material,” she says.

The result is impressively lifelike; Maizels calls it a “best guess” based on his closest living relatives — chimpanzees.

“This job does tick all the boxes for me. You can produce something that is really accurate. It all comes together when something has got a lot of information in it, and I feel I’ve done a really good piece of art as well, something that looks really attractive and interesting.” www.scientific-art.com

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