Art and medicine intersect for YSU students’ trip to Mexico and Africa

By Harold Gwin

An art auction will raise money to help finance two medical missions abroad.

YOUNGSTOWN — Art and medicine are topics that might not normally be mentioned in the same sentence, but the Department of Nursing at Youngstown State University has found a way to link the two.

Running medical missions to Mexico and Africa are expensive propositions, and the Department of Nursing intends to use an art auction to help raise funds for those upcoming trips.

A Nov. 20 auction, featuring more than 100 framed pieces of work from such artists as Wyeth, Rockwell, Brodinsky, Lui and Chagall, is in the works.

Proceeds will help finance a one-week trip to San Quintin, Mexico, in April and a two-week trip to Nigeria in January.

Both are being planned in collaboration with the Ohio Medical Clinic Missionaries, said Pamela McHugh Schuster, YSU professor of nursing, who led a mission trip involving YSU students and faculty to Mexico in September 2008.

The art auction will primarily feature prints of artists’ work in various price ranges. It will be held in the Ohio Room of Kilcawley Center at YSU with a preview starting at 6 p.m. and the auction at 7 p.m.

The trip to Mexico is a repeat of last September’s visit arranged by the YSU Department of Nursing during which YSU nursing students, and staff, accompanied by doctors, nurses and others, set up and operated a one-week medical clinic in San Quintin.

Read the full story Monday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com.