Anatomically Incorrect

Women may represent more than half the population and make the majority ofdoctor visits, but you'd never guess it by looking at a medical anatomy text.

The paucity of pictures depicting women so enraged Kathleen Mendelsohn, a student at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, that she brought it to the attention of the Dean of Education. Together they gathered the most popular medical texts and started counting. Flipping page-by-page through 12 books, they found that women were depicted in only 11 percent of non-reproductive anatomy illustrations and in 9 percent of nonreproductive physical diagnosis texts.

So what? Research shows students get lots of messages from the images. "By seeing mostly male illustrations, they may perceive that men are the norm, or the most important," says then-Dean Linda Nieman, Ph.D. And they may not be educated to handle all their patients. Students may develop an incomplete knowledge of the female anatomy, the team reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol. 272, No. 16).

A biased education may well beget a biased practice. "We need to develop educational materials with an eye to our population so that physicians can deal with all their patients—regardless of sex or race," asserts Nieman.

Women did manage to find parity in the illustrations contained in reproductive chapters, however. But coauthor Sophia Lee doesn't see this as a victory, just further evidence of gender bias in medicine and society: "Women have traditionally been viewed as mere vehicles for propagation of the human race."

The authors suggest that pictures of men and women be used side-by-side to depict differences—when known, that is. "Even though medical research has been done mostly on men," Mendelsohn points out, "texts continue to present the information as if it applies to women, too."

To Mendelsohn and her colleagues, each male illustration is worth a thousand words bespeaking the lack of research into the as yet unknown differences between the sexes.