Jordan Lamb, a medical student in the Clinical Scientist Training Program at Pitt Med, worked with HSLS librarians to locate and purchase several dermatology eBooks featuring skin of color, following a curriculum audit at the School of Medicine. After reviewing the lecture slides presented in Pitt Med’s first- and second-year classes, she found that “the majority of images in all courses, not just for dermatology, were of white skin.” Presentation of skin conditions (for example, psoriasis) can differ significantly on white skin (typically red patches) and on brown or black skin (typically purple patches). Lamb explained, “A lack of representation of all skin colors leads to a knowledge gap for students. Physicians are also less confident with diagnosing skin disease presenting on brown or black skin.”
A goal of her research project is to provide resources to instructors at the School of Medicine that can be used to increase the diversity of skin color representation in the curriculum. In studies like “Representations of Race and Skin Tone in Medical Textbook Imagery,” analysis shows that most of the images in “mainstream” dermatology and medical school textbooks are of white skin. However, the skin of color textbooks identified by Lamb expertly display skin conditions on brown and black skin. Lamb’s Visual Learning Equity: Resource Guide shares access information for HSLS eBooks as well as other free galleries of images on publicly available websites. Two examples of eBooks accessible at Pitt are “Taylor and Kelly’s Dermatology for Skin of Color” and “Atlas of Black Skin.”
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Thomas Willis (1621-1675) was a successful English physician, professor of natural sciences at Oxford, and a founding member of the Royal Society. He was an example of a physician who, instead of embracing classical authority, chose to study things based on direct observations. He was also the first to argue that research into the anatomy of the brain was the necessary foundation to speculations about the mind. Falk Library owns his work “Opera Omnia,” published in 1682 in Amsterdam by Henricus Wetstein.