Why the quilt?
The quilt you see on this website is not clip art. It is a handmade piece called “Block of the Month.”
Our graphic artist Alison King selected it for our Nashville meeting. She was drawn to the pattern, in which each block has a unique design, with only the colors pulling them together as a whole. AHMA and ICIM members are as diverse, from all backgrounds and specialties, yet are drawn together by a desire for a longing for effective treatments, advanced scientific healing and a return to the “art” of medicine.
Alison went to the auction ready to find and buy the “Nashville Quilt” because we were looking for a strong graphic that would boldly express our theme for the Nashville meeting “Healthy Brain, Healthy Body: Mental Wellness in the 21st Century.” Mental illness would be rather simple to show with a picture. But how does one portray mental wellness? A smiling person running through a field is the typical pharmaceutical image on TV, but we wanted to get beyond the cliché. A person wrapped in a quilt is a person wrapped in a hug. Quilts are warm, nurturing, comforters, and even in this context symbolize the variety and richness of lifestyle and nutrition changes needed for a patient to find mental wellness. Quilts are also associated with American folk arts, and we wanted to give a nod to a sense of place evoked by Nashville.
Next came the photo shoot. The figure is subtle; you have to allow yourself to look closely to realize that it is the figure of a sitting person in the folds of that quilt. Once the shape of the body is recognizable the viewer realizes that it has no head! This is purposeful. A typical graphic of mental health would focus on the head, the brain. However, our program committee has been very clear that the key to understanding symptoms of brain lies in understanding the body, the whole health of the patient. Our conference graphic focuses on the body, giving extra emphasis to the second phrase of our title.
The quilt began a second career as a raffle prize, a fund raiser for the William D Mitchell student scholarship, which we hope will bring increasing numbers of young people to progressive medical meetings at no cost.
Throughout 2009/10, the Nashville quilt will be on display. I hope to see it hanging behind our speaker podium, bringing warmth, color and focus to our academic program. At the conclusion of Nashville the quilt will be raffled and another chapter of ICIM and AHMA will come to an end.
To participate in a raffle, please send a check to ICIM, Box 271, Bluffton, OH 45817 and we will send you your tickets. $10 each or 3 for $25. All proceeds support our student scholarship, allowing medical students to attend our Nashville conference at no cost.
