Elizabeth Jameson's beautiful brain

Unfixed resource

"I feel incredibly powerful in my life despite my disease and limitations because my advocacy and my ability to be of service to others has been my lifeline. It’s been so critically important to me and I’m more ambitious than I’ve ever been. And I love my life." - Elizabeth Jameson

Elizabeth spoke at Stanford Medicine Ted-X ​in 2017 about her experiences as an artist living with Multiple Sclerosis. She used her own brain scans with the intention of celebrating and honoring what it means to live with an imperfect brain. Since then, her disease progression has made it impossible to use her hands as an artist, but Elizabeth is a force of resilience and adaptation. With each new challenge, she embraces change and has only grown more ambitious.

Elizabeth Jameson is an artist, writer and patient advocate extraordinaire who explores what it means to live in an imperfect body as part of the universal human experience.  Before her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, she served as a public interest lawyer representing incarcerated children; she later represented children living with chronic illnesses and disabilities in their attempts to receive medically necessary care.

As her disease progressed, she began creating art with her MRI’s to reclaim agency over her medical data. She transformed the unsettling, clinical images into work that invites people to open up conversations about what it means to have an illness or disability. Her work is part of permanent collections both nationally and internationally, including the National Institutes of Health, major universities, and medical schools.

Coronal view of the Elizabeth's brain stem, cerebellum, and lateral ventricles. She calls this piece Valentine for its display of the heart-like structure that appears in the brain, in all its warmth and mystery.

In Celebration, the blood vessels in the brain are dancing and holding hands in joyous celebration. The image is another example of discovering romance and beauty in the brain. 

She now writes and speaks across the country sharing her experiences living with illness and disability. Many of her lectures at medical schools and symposiums have been recorded and shared, including her 2017 TedX talk, “Learning to Celebrate and Embrace Our Imperfect Bodies.” Her essay, “Losing Touch, Finding Intimacy,” was included in the New York Times book, About Us, released in September 2019. Another article in the New York Times, Elizabeth discusses the joy of food, the challenges of being unable to feed oneself and the never-ending lust for a bag of lime-flavored tortilla chips. And in her most recent essay she explores the healing power of swearing!

In the last two years, Unfixed has been thrilled to parter with Elizabeth, creating MS Confidential—a monthly webcast series on navigating the chaos of MS. Consisting of a few diverse panelists all living with various stages of MS, MS Confidential provides a safe space to disclose innermost frustrations and challenges, engage in open conversations with one another, and provide opportunities for the audience to participate as well. You can view the trailer to the webcast here. (It will put a smile on your face and wrap a warm blanket around your heart.)

Elizabeth’s spirit is effervescent and overflowing with the beautifully complex truths of what it means to be human. I highly recommend spending time to diving into one woman’s powerful, and seemingly endless, offerings to the world.

Are you new to Unfixed? Or have you missed previous chapters? You can access them all for free with the link below. I recommend starting from the beginning.