01/05/2024

Friends of Franz Podcast S3 E5: Brushes and Blades with Artist and Neurosurgeon Dr. Kathryn Ko (Doc Ambidexter)

At first, the operating room and an art studio may seem to be the antithesis of settings and purposes. However, they could not be more alike and comparable: the stillness of focus of both operating on an organ and painting on a canvas, the vast array of sterile scalpels and paintbrushes, the richness of flowing bright red blood on the table and the maroon pigment dripping on the floor from the board, and the surge of adrenaline in the events of a crashing patient and a new creative idea in the spur of the moment. For our episode's expert guest today, this is definitely the case: the colliding worlds of brain surgery and the fine arts, the sacred space of the surgical room and the atelier. Truly, when she is not operating on a brain, she is painting one.

We are joined by board-certified neurosurgeon and multimedia artist Dr. Kathryn Ko. Dr. Ko has been the Chief of Neurosurgery at MetroNeurosurgery for over three decades, where she invented the patent for a method of performing decompressive craniectomy through a bone flap removal from a cranium. She is the author of The Survival Bible for Women in Medicine, published in 1998, and the creator of the blogpost Neurosurgery Le Freak in 2015. Within the arts, Dr. Ko has been an artist and writer for The Neurosurgeon's Studio: American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) since 2016, curator of the American Medical Women's Association: Studio AMWA since 2015, and a member of the prestigious Society of Illustrators since 2015. She has been featured on The New York Times.