But for talented artist Madeleine Kersting, drawing those carefully carved-up crows, rats and other specimens at Amherst Central Junior High in Buffalo, a US port city in upstate New York, is the beginning of what will eventually become her life’s work as Queensland’s only medical illustrator.

More than three decades later, she laughs as she contemplates what her classmates must have thought of her as she carried around bottles of dead animals to take home and sketch in pen and ink.

“I went crazy for those and just started drawing every specimen I could find,” the 46-year-old, known as “Mimi”, says. “I don’t really know what my classmates thought of me, they probably thought I was weird. But I was so into what I was doing, I wouldn’t have noticed anyway. Back in high school, I was really a bit vain and didn’t want to wear my glasses – if anyone was looking at me and pointing, I wouldn’t have seen them. I had such terrible vision.”

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Kersting cannot remember a time she wasn’t drawing. “I was always an artist,” she says. “I ­remember being in kindergarten, all the kids ­lining up with their pads of paper and their little coloured pencils asking me to draw them things.”

Her talent could have taken a different turn had it not been for “a wonderful man” named John Cisek – her art teacher in junior high. Apart from identifying and fostering Kersting’s flair as an artist, Cisek lived next door to a hunter, and would source new material for her to dissect and draw, satisfying her dual passion for biology.

“One day, he brought me in a paper bag with a fox head wrapped in plastic,” she says. “I vividly recall that wonderful day.”

It was the middle of winter in Buffalo, with temperatures frequently plummeting below zero – perfect weather for preserving the fox head and “do-it-yourself dissection”, as she describes it now. She took the fox head home to her basement to dissect and draw, keeping it in her ­family’s unheated garage between sketches.

By this stage, she had her own “little set” of ­dissecting instruments – a scalpel and forceps – to expose the fox’s muscles. “It sounds like I’m crazy,” she says, her American accent still thick, despite 15 years living in Brisbane.

“I just wanted to see how it was all put together. I remember being very young and wanting to know how things worked and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know. Life seems like a miracle to me.”

FULL PARENTAL SUPPORT

Her parents, Lucille, 77, and Richard, 81, both retired librarians, could easily have ­dampened their eccentric middle child’s penchant for dissection, funnelling her artistic flair into another, more palatable, direction. But they didn’t.

“I think about this all the time, almost every day,” Kersting says earnestly.

“My parents were so supportive of anything we were interested in. They were always there for me and willing to get me art supplies, or whatever I needed, to do what I wanted to do. They told me I was a great kid, constantly saying ‘I love you’, and that what I was doing was fantastic.

“Even things I was bad at – I was terrible at math – they would just say: ‘As long as you’re ­trying your best, that’s fine’. It makes a difference, it’s huge. I really credit them with my confidence.”

The skulls and skeletons left over from some of her dissections are still in a cupboard in her childhood home in upstate New York.

“My mum doesn’t look at them,” Kersting says, a belly laugh rising from somewhere deep inside her as she speaks. “I dissected a deer head once. Not to sound gory or anything but it had a terrible, kind of bloody deer smell. She wasn’t too happy about that but she didn’t say anything. I still have the skull back in Buffalo.”

Kersting has also kept her sketchbook from those teenage years when she loved reading ­horror comics and kept newts, all named Jody, for pets.

“I loved the name Jody and every time one would die, I would just keep calling them Jody,” she explains. When one of her pet newts – lizard-like amphibians – died prematurely from a fungal infection, he too was dissected and drawn. “He kicked the bucket a bit early, poor little thing.”

At 16, Kersting met a medical illustrator at the State University of New York, Buffalo, setting her sights on scientific drawing as a career.

She ­contacted the university’s anatomy department where she found a mentor in Dr Charles Severin, who introduced her to the cadaver laboratory. ­Although still in high school, after class she’d take a bus downtown to the university to spend time with Severin, who connected her with other ­doctors and “Pete, the embalmer guy”.

He would also give her assignments. One day she walked into the lab and found three slabs of human tissue on a tray that Severin ­wanted her to draw.

“At first glance, my brain was thinking, I kind of know what that is, but is it really?,” she says of the horizontal abdominal cross-sections.

“Boy, it was neat because you could see how everything fit in there – liver, kidneys, intestines. The ­intestines are my least favourite part of the body. They’re never attractive things.”

She half apologises for the “horrible” nature of the conversation but the look on her face exposes more awe at the wonders of the human body than revulsion.

By the time she started her five-year medical illustration undergraduate degree in Ohio, at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Case Western ­Reserve School of Medicine, about 300km southwest of Buffalo, she’d already spent years in the cadaver lab learning and drawing. Kersting ­started the course with 12 other students and ­finished with four.

“They dropped out like flies,” she says. “The classes were really intense – going to operating theatres, going to autopsies.”

Kersting’s first job as a medical illustrator was in New Orleans at the Louisiana State University School of Medicine and Dentistry, where she was the director of art and photography.

It was in the birthplace of jazz that she would meet her future husband, Australian John Flynn, a Nine Network cameraman. Flynn was a double bass player ­performing at the Ponderosa Stomp music fest­ival in New Orleans when they met in 2003. They shared a love of 1940s and ’50s rockabilly music.

MOVING WEST IN INCREMENTS

Kersting quit her job and moved to Los ­Angeles, where Flynn joined her for three months.

“I drove across the US to LA to see what the art scene there was like and to get that little bit closer to Australia,” she says.

“I remember cruising down the Santa Monica Highway, it was a beautiful day and I was looking at the ocean and I thought, this is the only time I’m going to be this free until I retire. I was living with John in this crazy artist warehouse-colony thing with a ­massive studio. It was a very great time of my life. It was wonderful. We were poor. But it was fun.”

From there she followed Flynn to Brisbane and spent two years doing volunteer work, unable to take a paid job until she secured a working visa.

During that time, she volunteered with diversionary therapists at the Zion Lutheran Nursing home in Nundah, in Brisbane’s north, and for other charities. “It was wonderful,” she says, her eyes lighting up at the memory.

“I just love older ­people, they’ve got such great stories.”

When she was finally able to start looking for paid work in 2006, serendipity intervened as it had previously in her life – the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute advertised for an illustrator. She got the job.

“Perfect,” remembers Kersting, who is still one of only about half-a-dozen medical illustrators in Australia. She’s been at QIMR Berghofer ever since.

These days it’s not so much organs or muscles that she draws, it’s cellular biology – illustrating the chemical reactions both within and between cells or the body’s reaction to a viral, fungal or bacterial invasion.

Her work – all done on computer – has appeared on the covers of some of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals.

Kersting – now Mimi Kersting Flynn since her marriage in October 2011 – has also started ­creating scientific animations aimed at simplifying complex research for the general public. Mum to five-year-old son Edison – Eddie for short – she hopes to create a television show for young children with a working title of Worms and Germs, to teach them about infection. “I’m writing the ­teleplays now,” she says enthusiastically.

Sometimes all she has to start with is a ­scientist’s description of a biological event and their own crude drawings.

Sitting in a coffee shop at the QIMR Berghofer’s headquarters in inner-north Herston, she draws a few circles on a serviette to explain, breaking into another cacophony of laughter.

“I need to do a fair bit of research sometimes,” she says. “Rarely will I send it off and it doesn’t come back with some revisions. There’s always something. On a really good day, I’ll be able to get up to the laboratory and have a peek through the microscope, but often I’ll get a photo with a note saying: ‘Here’s the bacteria I want’.”

After 13 years working at one of the world’s top scientific institutions, she’s still excited to come to work every day.

“I come in the front door full of energy and happiness,” Kersting Flynn says with enthusiasm. “I do know how lucky I am to work here. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t learn something new.”

To her mind, scientists should be celebrities on a pedestal higher than sports stars or Hollywood A-­listers.

“One of my pet peeves about any ­Western culture is science doesn’t get enough ­attention,” she says.

“Where are our priorities? Every day scientists make incredible ­discoveries. They’re trying to cure ­cancer. What could be more worthwhile than that? The reason I love my job so much is how proud I am to be part of the process of ­explaining science to the world. It’s important. I want people to be able to look at it and say: ‘Oh yeah, now I get it’.” ■

Kersting Fynn’s work forms part of the Tiny Worlds Art Exhibition at Townsville’s Museum of Tropical Queensland, until March 31