From the Artist

"At the beginning my drawings were not deliberate. Anyway, not as tributes to anybody, or even as any kind of record. I had always drawn, since before I can remember. And somehow I had found visages as fascinating as viscera, and had the vague notion that some day I would more seriously pursue fine arts, specifically painting, preferably portrait paintings, but in the meantime there I was in medical school and I figured I could perfect my drawing skill by practice sketches of the profusion of unwitting models all around me, not only faculty but also my classmates. Quite unintentionally, both for me and certainly for LLU, medical school was also an art school. But basically I drew in class for the same reason other people doodle.

"And through my whole career and wherever I have gone I have continued sketching (some would say obsessively), in a pinch, on the palm of my hand: people at airports, in restaurants, but mostly medical students, residents, doctors, nurses, in so many Grand Rounds and so many committees, which I viewed as opportunities more for drawing than climbing the medical-political ladder or pursuing other more honorworthy things, thereby disappointing, I’m sure, not a few of my old medical school profs and discomfiting, I know, not a few committee chairmen.

"I have always preferred to think of these thousands of drawings as fine arts pen sketches, but somehow, in the course of a few seconds it takes to draw a face, topography is sometimes, I acknowledge, swept along by the fun of a flourishing pen. And if not a few of the drawings Raymond Herber ’57 chose for his book are pretty definite caricatures, Rene Modglin ’48 is to be thanked. Having caught me in the act back on his anatomy and pathology classes, he suggested that while I was waiting to be called up to the army after interning, I should do a more finished collection in a breezy, frankly caricaturistic style. And it was mostly this old collection of more deliberate caricatures that Herber chose for his book."

—Samuel Wesley Kime ’53-A in the March-April 1995 Alumni JOURNAL