Dr. Virginia Aita Oral History Interview, McGoogan Health Sciences Library, January 30th, 2024.
What can happen when a University of Nebraska at Omaha senior interested in the arts works in Special Collections and Archives at McGoogan Health Sciences Library? For student worker Grace Spaulding, it meant discovering a fascinating collaboration that shaped her capstone project. Below, Grace shares her journey from transcribing interviews to exploring historical medical illustrations—a prime example of student research in action.
Written by: Grace Spaulding
As a senior at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) and a student worker in the Leon S. McGoogan Health Sciences Library, I wanted to focus my capstone thesis on one of the major projects I worked on for the last four years at University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). While working on transcriptions for the UNMC Oral History Program, I learned about the collaboration between Dr. Virginia Aita and Dr. Mark Gilbert. Their partnership brought art and medicine together in ways that changed how we think about care.
I transcribed the oral history interview for Dr. Aita and was immediately intrigued. When it came time to start my thesis project, the McGoogan Library gave me the opportunity to conduct an oral history interview with Dr. Gilbert and learn more about their work from an artist’s perspective. This research led to my thesis: Medical Illustration Pictured Through Visual Culture. This study explores how medical illustration, from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, functions not only as a tool for scientific education but as a cultural system that shapes how societies visualize, interpret, and value the human body. The illustrations that are featured are all housed within the Rare Book Collection at UNMC. The perspective of both Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Aita played a large role in my research.
Dr. Aita, Professor Emerita at the UNMC College of Public Health, has a background in ethics, palliative care, and health humanities. During her career, she worked to integrate humanistic perspectives into medical education. Dr. Gilbert is a Scottish artist and researcher who is internationally recognized for using portraiture to explore clinical experiences. Together, they worked side by side to use art to reveal the lived experience of patients and caregivers. Portraits of Care highlights human experiences with care within UNMC’s community. Dr. Gilbert created portraits of people receiving chemotherapy, transplant recipients, mothers in childbirth, head-and-neck cancer patients, nurses, chaplains, and hospital staff. These portraits captured perspectives of what it means to give and receive care. They illustrate struggles, relationships, and resilience, and reveal aspects of caregiving that are often hard to put into words. Dr. Gilbert completed his PhD at UNMC, focusing on depictions of medical care and his dissertation, The Experience of Portraiture in a Clinical Setting, is housed in the UNMC Digital Commons.
UNMC served as more than just a setting for this project. The campus opened resources, clinics, and communities to the arts. The support for qualitative research through these portraits led to exhibitions that shared the works with both public and professional audiences. By taking part in this process, the University of Nebraska Medical Center community helped develop arts-based methods of inquiry in medicine.
This important work was featured in prominent medical journals including, AMA Journal of Ethics, International Museum of Surgical Science, and the Journal of Medical Humanities. Another form of preservation is through the McGoogan Library’s Oral History Program, where UNMC Archivists preserve the voices of faculty, staff, and collaborators. Oral history interviews with both Dr. Aita and Dr. Gilbert are publicly available through their online collections. The oral history initiative creates an archival home for reflections on projects like Portraits of Care. This ensures that current and future researchers will hear directly from those who created, witnessed, and participated in this work.
This collaboration between Dr. Aita, Dr. Gilbert, and the larger UNMC community is more than just a set of portraits. It provides a record of stories, reflections, relationships, and narratives of care. This serves as an example of how a medical center can foster innovation between art and healthcare. The work done at UNMC shows exciting interdisciplinary connections and ensures that the experiences of patients and caregivers alike are recognized as both a method of inquiry and a depiction of humanity.