• Lesser Home
• 'The Art of Learning Medicine' collection
• 'An Artist in the University Medical Center' collection
• Other works of art
•     '21 Years with Cystic Fibrosis'
•     '100 to a Bottle'
•     '780 Children Have Lunch Within the Hour'
•     'Bronchoscopy'
•     'Case Discussion Before Making Rounds'
•     'The Elderly'
•     'Enzyme Replacement'
•     'Laser Procedure to Prevent Blindness'
•     'Magnetic Resonance Imaging, 3-D'
•     'MRI Film of an AIDS Patient'
•     'Nothing Will Ever Happen to Them'
•     'Not One Millimeter Off'
•     'One Out of Nine'
•     'Pediatric Nephrology Conference'
•     'Peptide Synthesization'
•     'Strategy for Radiation'
•     'Teaching Rounds at Charity'
•     'They Just Melted Away'
•     'Therapeutical Apheresis
•     'Waiting for a New Heart'
•     'World Wide Dissemination of Medical Knowledge'

'Therapeutical Apheresis'
(ink drawing with tempera, 29' x 39')
©May H. Lesser

I draw a very ill young woman in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. The apheresis treatment has failed twice. She is smiling and laughing! "Why is she laughing?" I wonder what she has to laugh about! Then I realize that she is viewing a comedy film on the tiny television set over her bed. How kind -- she has an hour's release from worrying. The chief surgeon of the National Cancer Institute, who is this patient's doctor, tells me about a similar patient who wrote a little essay that started with "I died today." The poem talked about how she wasn't going to see her children grow up. "It was poignant and so sad because it was true. It keeps your priorities in order when you are doing the kind of research that I do. We never forget why we are doing it," the doctor said.