IN PEACE - By Dr. Fred Kimura, M.D. ’04
DURING THE SUMMER after his first year of medical school at UCLA, Dr. Fred Kimura traveled to Mexico for an intensive six-week course to study medical Spanish. It was in a small museum in the colonial city of Morelia that he came across this painting of a reclining monk hanging above a rustic bench with a robe and sandals. “The scene had a quiet simplicity and refl ective spirituality that I wanted to take home with me,” says Dr. Kimura, who is now a fourth-year resident in emergency medicine at Jacobi/ Montefiore Medical Center in New York. “It was unclear to me if the monk is sleeping or laid to rest, but he appears to be at peace, and the empty robe on the bench gives the image an extracorporeal feel of release from one’s earthly bonds.”
This photograph was originally published in the 2002 issue of UCLA BEAT, the literary magazine of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.