Medical art has been around since before the turn of the 20th century and, although the industry has improved technologically, it has left people with darker skin behind. Here’s why this needs to change…



Medical art is a means of communicating medical knowledge which was once done through paintings. However, it is now more prevalent in textbooks used by doctors and students to understand how to treat certain conditions.

The issue is that most of these textbooks don’t have black bodies represented in them and, in turn, this leads to the misdiagnosis of medical conditions in black people. Any black person who has been unfairly treated in this way should seek the advice of a medical negligence solicitor to make sure they are held accountable and it doesn’t happen to others. This, amongst other reasons, is why things need to change.

In this post, we’re going to outline the lack of black representation in medical art and discuss why changing this pattern is important. Take a look…

Why is Black Representation in Medical Art Important?

In 2012 a sociology student studying at the University of British Columbia was in a doctor’s waiting room and noticed that none of the posters on the walls featured people with darker skin.

This student went on to analyse faces in four textbooks widely used in North American medical schools as her honour’s thesis. She teamed up with another student in her master’s degree to analyse skin tone in over 4,000 images in later versions of the same textbooks.

These analyses found that, across these four medical textbooks widely used by medical students and doctors, only between one and five percent of the pictures featured dark skin. But why does this matter?

Misdiagnosis of cancer in black people
In the four textbooks we just mentioned, imagery of six common cancers for people with colour or dark skin tone hardly exist. This could result in unequal healthcare treatment and medical misdiagnosis.

Even though black people are less likely to get skin cancer than white people, they’re more likely to die when they’re diagnosed. The five-year melanoma survival rate for Black patients is just 70 percent compared with 94 percent for white patients. This is because 52 percent of black people receive an initial diagnosis of an advanced skin cancer compared to 16 percent of white people.

To find skin cancer, doctors have to look for melanomas on hands, feet, and nails, but none of the widely distributed medical textbooks show images of what it would look like on dark skin tones. This suggests that the doctors are not trained to find skin cancer in black people.

These doctors are then more likely to misdiagnose, or delay treatment, until a later stage in the cancer in black people than they are in white people. This counts for other conditions too, such as Lyme disease and spider bites, all of which could end in fatalities.

Othering and stereotyping of people with darker skin



When someone with darker skin looks at a medical textbook and realises they’re not represented in any of the medical art, it makes them feel ‘othered’ and unsafe because medical science is not geared toward treating their ethnicity.

It’s not just that black people are underrepresented in medical art generally, they’re also overrepresented in images involving sexually transmitted diseases.

Another analysis of medical textbooks conducted by Jules Lipoff, an assistant professor of clinical dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania showed, that when it came to syphilis, many dermatology textbooks relied heavily on images of dark skin.

In fact, the number of depictions of dark skin was twice as high for infections that were sexually transmitted compared to images of infectious diseases in general.

Takes power out of the individual’s hands
Although visiting the doctor is always recommended for serious medical conditions, when it comes to skin, it’s always useful to do an initial analysis of the condition on the internet to get an idea of how serious the condition might be.

When a white person has a skin issue, all they have to do is Google it and they’ll be inundated with images of white skin that they can compare to their own to decide whether they have the condition or not. But, when a black person Googles a skin issue, there are very few images of dark skin to compare themselves to, and diagnosing their condition becomes very difficult.

The lack of black bodies in medical art on the internet takes this power away from people of colour.

To combat this issue, an Instagram account was started by a woman of colour named Ellen Buchanan Weiss called ‘Brown Skin Matters’. Here, she posts images of skin conditions in darker skin next to images of the same condition in white skin.

She asked her followers to send in their own pictures and the account grew exponentially in a very short space of time. Weiss even had tons medical schools, physicians, nurses, and pharmacists messaging her telling her how useful the images had been.

Biases the future technology of the medical sector



There are issues with AI imaging software that doctors are trialling to detect medical conditions in patients. This software collects as many images of medical conditions as it can, and learns to diagnose them in a patient.

The only problem is, there aren’t enough images of these conditions in black people, which makes it difficult for the AI algorithm to diagnose them. With images of black conditions only becoming more prolific in the last few years, it will take time for these algorithms to identify medical conditions in black people.

This leaves black people out of some of the amazing technological advancements in the medical field, which is discrimination in its purest form.

Why do Black Bodies Need More Representation in Medical Art?

In this post, we’ve given you some idea as to the deficit of black bodies in medical art and how this can be damaging to people of colour.

Because medical art doesn’t include black bodies, black people are more likely to die of skin cancer when they are diagnosed with it. They are also othered and stereotyped by the images in medical textbooks, have their power of self-diagnosis significantly diminished, and are left out of the future of medical diagnostic technology.

It’s clear that something needs to change.

Photo credits:
Doctor using a smart phone - Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Post-it stereotyping - Photo by Yasin Yusuf on Unsplash
Doctor on imaging computer - Photo by MART PRODUCTION from Pexels