If you look at the word “inspiration,” there is another hidden inside it: P-A-I-N. All the letters are there, waiting to be revealed by those who know to look for them. The desire to quell pain is a common impulse of both doctors and artists. So just as a doctor seeks to ease a patient’s suffering, an artist turns to art to ease their own. Sometimes the doctor is also an artist, or the artist is also a doctor, which is not surprising when you consider the kind of creative thinking a career in medicine requires and the emotional toll it can take.