Illustrations of Injuries Make Their Case
The 3-foot-high drawing of the beautiful young girl shows, in hyper-realistic detail, her every feature: her brown hair, her big blue eyes and her soft skin, red and ripped open in an auto accident.
It helped attorneys for Amy Hall and her family recover damages in their lawsuit against the driver who hit and injured her.
The drawing is by Medical-Legal Illustrations Inc. of Atlanta, one of several companies tapping a fertile market: Courtroom exhibits showing jurors exactly what happened to victims of car wrecks, botched surgeries and other mishaps.
“No one’s ever there with a camera when it happens,” said Greg Swayne, 30, founder and president. “We try to make sure the jury appreciates the conditions of the client, as they were at the time of the accident.”
Newest Growth Area
“It’s the newest, most dynamic growth area in our field,” said Robert Demarest, president of the Assn. of Medical Illustrators and director of biomedical communications at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York.
In 1984, Swayne was fresh out of the Medical College of Georgia with a master’s degree in medical illustration, looking for work. He got a job that meant spending six months drawing the foot, 800 times, for a medical textbook.
“It seemed like a pretty dismal future. It was a grueling experience. There’s only so many ways you can draw feet.”
Someone told him that he might be able to do work for attorneys. “I made two or three calls, and that quick, I had two or three cases--paying me more than I made during six months working on a textbook.”
Since then, Swayne’s company--now with six illustrators, a registered nurse and five support staffers--has prepared exhibits for more than 300 court cases. Swayne expects revenues approaching $1 million this year.
Illustrators work from blurry X-rays and jumbled doctors’ diagrams, making vivid the injuries a layman would never spot. See-through overlays contrast the normal state of the body with the problems of the plaintiff: a brain concussion from a car wreck, a spinal cord infected through negligence, a heart punctured by a surgical instrument that slipped.
“Instead of relying on the medical jargon of an expert witness, illustrations can bridge the gap . . . instead of descriptions of arcane anatomy that most juries wouldn’t understand,” Demarest said.
Drawings also help hold the jury’s interest during long, tedious hours of medical testimony. “To the extent you can put something visual in front of them, you can keep them on the edge of their seats,” Swayne said.
About 80% of the company’s work has been for personal injury lawsuits; most of the rest for medical malpractice cases. Swayne said he hasn’t kept track, but he figures the majority of his personal-injury clients have won and his malpractice plaintiffs at least help their chances.
His most publicized case was the lawsuit former Citadel football player Marc Buoniconti, son of former National Football League star Nick Buoniconti, filed against his school, the team physician and the team trainer over a 1985 injury that left him a quadriplegic. Buoniconti lost his negligence suit last month, but won $800,000 in a settlement with the school and the trainer.
“I don’t think drawings won or lost the case,” said his attorney, Robert Wallace of Charleston, S.C., adding, “Anything that’s going to help them see the problem has got to be helpful.”
Some Gruesome Pictures
Medical-Legal illustrators must paint some gruesome pictures but they won’t pander to sensationalism, Swayne said. “We’ve been asked to do some unethical things. One guy asked us to show an amputated foot, lying on the side of the road, with blood oozing from the wounds.
“We’re here to show the injuries in an illustrated format, in a clinical setting, if you will. If the drama comes through after that, fine.”
Still, a visitor to Swayne’s studio notices Amy Hall’s eyes. “We usually show the victim with eyes closed,” he said. “But they sent us a picture of her with those big blue eyes, and we said, ‘Those have got to stay.’ ”
