Finding the Art in Medicine
This story was written by Karin Zhao, SSOM Class of 2029.
She describes Chai’s hair being so long that when held, she sometimes can’t tell where the fur ends and the cat begins.
Rather than just laughing it off, Peterson, who is a professor of neurosciences at the University of South Dakota, sits with the thought. A cat moves through the world with whiskers, smell and vision that are nothing like ours. That perceptual difference, she says, deserves genuine respect.
Such sensitivity to perspective shaped Peterson’s artwork. It also guided her in another role: a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician. For her, art and medicine have never been a contradiction.
From a young age, Peterson knew she wanted to be a physician. Her path took her from studying biology at Harvard to earning her M.D. at Cornell, followed by residency at Northwestern, and a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Minnesota.
Alongside her academic endeavors, her artistic creation never stopped. She started drawing as a child and continued through medical school. Not as an escape, but as part of how she learns, such as drawing out concepts from lectures.
Origami found Peterson the same way most things did, through her careful attention to her surroundings. She noticed a classmate folding paper, grew curious and began folding as well. It became another medium for thinking with her hands.
Over the years, Peterson has worked in pencil, pen, ink, pastel, photography and poetry. She is now a certified origami instructor through the Nippon Origami Association in Tokyo. Her photography has appeared in Harvard Magazine, the Argus Leader, and for years in South Dakota Medicine. Each medium, she says, changes how she thinks, which is why she prefers working in series, allowing ideas to ferment and deepen over time.
Physicians learn dense, precise vocabularies to communicate efficiently among colleagues. That same language, left untranslated in a conversation with a patient, stops being a tool and becomes a wall. Peterson has been training herself in this kind of translation for a long time.
“True simplicity means preserving everything that matters while removing everything that obscures,” she emphasized. Simplicity requires more thought, not less.
“Imagine folding a paper endlessly–you will only get a compressed paper ball,” she starts. “You have to step back and think deliberately about where the next fold should be.”
The skill that’s required is knowing when to stop. The same discipline applies to explaining patients their diagnoses, translating a complex idea into its simple essential form.
Translation, though, is only half of it. Perspective is another aspect that Peterson constantly circles back to. She would ask herself, “Are you too close? Too far? At the wrong angle? Is what you’re seeing actually clear, or just familiar?” It is natural to miss things when the perspective is rigid.
This is why, for Peterson, art and medicine have never felt like separate careers to juggle.
“They have always been part of me,” she says. “They feed back into one another, just different emphases of the same whole.” What she has built over decades is not a double life, but a single, more complete way of seeing the world.
Peterson’s next origami exhibit opens at Mount Marty University’s Bede Art Gallery in Yankton in September 2027, showcasing multiple media including poetry, ink and origami in conversation with each other and with the viewer. She describes them as “a conscious and subconscious way of approaching a topic.”
Chai, of course, remains indifferent to all of it. But perhaps, that is the point. Some perspectives can only be respected, never fully reached.
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