Medical Bias Dissected

You’re a young doc on duty late one night at Yale-New Haven Hospital. In walks a morbidly obese person, reeking of alcohol, disoriented, and with a distinct foreign accent. To use medical training lingo, he’s ​“presenting” with pain in the left upper quadrant of the chest. How do you stay objective during your examination?

That question is graphically engaged in ​“Moral Judgement in Evaluating Disease: Some Pictures for Discussion,” the new exhibition of fascinating disease-themed prints at the Yale Medical School’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.

The show features 15 prints assembled in the library’s entryway corridor by medical students David K. Dupee and Melinda Wang, in which they try to illustrate how general societal attitudes toward immigrants, alcohol and drug users, the obese, the impoverished, and the mentally ill influence and perhaps determine or predetermine a medical diagnosis.

Or, as the curators put it at the event to mark the opening of their exhibition, ​“we aim to impress upon viewers that the association between health and morality is deeply ingrained within the very fabric of society.”

The show runs through Sept. 5 off the lobby at the 333 Cedar Street building. Visitors without a Yale ID simply need to go sign in and then enjoy the show.

Enjoy, because the curators have chosen prints from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries that are colorful and full of narrative and drama. They provide what they call a ​“patient vignette,” or brief description of the main subject of each print as if that person were a patient being examined by a doctor, not only a subject being scrutinized by a viewer.

For example, before you read about Robert Riggs’ ​“Ward Rounds,” one of many 1940s prints he produced for pharmaceutical companies, you get a medical picture of the subject: ​“This 65-year-old woman presents with fatigue and abdominal discomfort. She has a history of hepatitis C from former drug use and hopes to be considered for a liver transplant. She denies drug and alcohol use for the past ten years.”

The danger of seeing a patient as fitting a kind of pre-existing category of cases is underlined in the informative label that then follows, which includes in its analysis of the print’s composition: ​“Note how the use of lighting draws the viewer’s eye to the patient’s bloated belly and away from her face, perhaps lending her symptoms a degree of primacy that supersedes her individuality.”

The print in the show that speaks perhaps most specifically to our moment is a Frederich Graetz print published in the popular magazine Puck in 1883. Titled ​“The Kind of ​‘Assisted Emigrant’ We can Not Afford to Admit,” the curators say this print captures the hysterical fear that must have been prevalent as America began to admit more and more immigrants from strange places, from which they might bring the seeds of dreaded epidemics, like cholera, noted in the belt of the skeletal figure.

The cannons of New York Harbor’s Castle Garden, the point of entry for immigrants before Ellis Island, are blasting carbolic acid, a popular disinfectant of the time, at the poor skeletal figure, and a phalanx of baton-wielding cops are supporting the public health officials who are saying, get away, go home.

The composition made me think of the Ebola virus outbreak of a few years ago and how our fears were no different, but our science and therefore our management at least somewhat better than 1883.

All the prints in the show are from the Collection of Prints and Drawings at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, which is open until 7:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and until 10 p.m. on the weekend.