Making Dr Liston’s Surgical Equipment in Illustrator
As part of my coursework for my masters programme, we were assigned to make an illustration of a piece of medical equipment using Adobe Illustrator. I started researching what instrument to make for my project, and we had some scope to do a historic instrument. Because of this, I looked into some famous Scottish doctors and found the surgeon with a ‘300% mortality rate” for one of his surgeries. This is because his patient died, an assistant was nicked with a blade and died of infection and a spectator, because this was in the 18th-19th centauries, dies of shock in the gallery. He was also known for having one of the fastest surgeries in history, completing some amputations in under 30 seconds.
Initially when researching Robert Liston I thought he was trying to show-off with his surgical skill and quickness, but he was in fact trying to save his patients. Speed during this period of time was a major factor in surgeries being successful, as pain medication and anaesthesia were not invented at this time, meaning if patients were not operated on quickly and efficiently, they could easily die of blood loss or shock. Liston also innovated the way amputations were performed, and his goal was for longevity in the surgical result. This would prevent infection by not having the wound exposed for too long in unsanitary conditions, or having to reopen the wound to fix errors. Liston was also one of the first surgeons in Europe to incorporate early anaesthesia into his practice towards the end of his career.
To begin my illustration, I found research papers about Liston which are the sources for this information above. On one of these was a good photograph of a pair of Dr Liston’s bone forceps and a Caitlin knife, also called a Liston knife as his namesake. I made a sketch of these, then traced over this in Photoshop. From here I moved the project to Illustrator. It took me quite a while to get used to the interface and software, and a while to understand really how to make the instruments. I couldn’t figure out how to make the shading on the forceps in particular and then it dawned on me to make the shading as individual shapes. This does make the file size very large however with the number of layers. The benefit to working with Illustrator is that the files are vectors, and so they can be resized as much as you want without any quality being lost.