Medical illustration programs prepare people to make drawings or paintings of human or animal bodies. Students learn medical and dental photography. They study anatomy and art. They also learn computer graphics.

Do you remember at what point in your life you stopped reading picture books? At first, the words on the page started to take up as much room as the pictures. Then, the words started to take up more room than the pictures, until finally, there were no pictures at all. Maybe you felt some sadness. Or maybe you felt excitement because you were starting to read "grown-up" books.

Now imagine if your textbooks no longer had pictures in them as well. Imagine how difficult it would be to learn geography without a map, or geometry without images of angles, circles, and triangles.

The fact is, even without returning to our childhood picture books, there are some subjects that very much rely on visual aids. Medicine is one such subject. Before we knew anything about the way the human body works, and before we even had names for all its parts, we knew what it looked like inside.

Curious, scientifically minded people many years ago would cut open cadavers and sketch what they saw. It may seem gross, but that was the beginning of medical illustration. And we owe credit to these artists for helping us begin to understand how our bodies work. Medical illustrators draw upon this legacy by using art to illustrate complex medical concepts.

Medical illustrators can put their art to many uses. You might draw sketches of an exciting new surgical technique for a medical journal. Or you could design for a children's educational web site an animated display of the way our leg muscles move when we walk.

As you might imagine, the combination of art and medical science in this field influences the course work you take in this program of study. To understand more about your "subject," you take courses in basic and graduate level medical sciences such as human anatomy and cell biology. This is because you aren't simply drawing or illustrating what's there. You have to know what's going on and how things work to effectively portray a complicated idea.

In addition to medical science courses, you also take art courses focusing on different medical illustration techniques. You get to participate in courses where you observe first-hand surgeries and other operations and then sketch aspects of what you see.

There are about five schools in the U.S. that offer accredited medical illustration programs. These are master's degree programs that typically take six years of full-time study after high school. That figure includes the four years of full-time study you usually need to finish your bachelor's degree first.