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Rapid Responses: Rapid Responses published:
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Kudos to BMJ
- Marjorie Shuer (19 December 1999)
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A meagre survey
- Wilfred N Arnold (21 December 1999)
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Study is tendentious
- David H Bevan (23 December 1999)
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Marjorie Shuer Phoenix, AZ
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How unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer. (Physician) Virginia Woolf I commend the British Medical Journal publishing Jocalyn P Clark’s piece on the Analysis of JAMA Cover Art. It is time to question this tradition of "fine art" on the cover of JAMA if it perpetuates stereotypic male and female roles. As per Virgina Woolf’s statement regarding writers, women physicians have been "locked out" of highly paid salaried positions in Academia, leadership and business. Women are sadly underrepresented in full professor positions as well as Dean’s and Chairs. This is true for specialties that are converging on 50% female. Why is there only one female Chair of Psychiatry in the US and only three Chair’s in OBGYN. Why do Women’ Pediatricians with the same training and years of experiences as their male colleagues make only 66% of the salary? Perhaps image is "everything:" and if we continue to portray women as submissive, and sexy, why is there a need for change? Dr. Southgate’s twenty five year history of choosing the cover of JAMA has reflected her interests in art as well as her perception of society. Times have changed and perhaps the subtitles of the depiction require re-examination. I was instrumental in 1992 in convincing the AMA News not to publish derogatory pictures of women which they did in their art. One forgettable piece had a man walking down the isle with a women who appeared to be a snake with the bridal veil and a long serpents tale as well as a forked tongue. The caption read something like before you marry managed care, think twice….implying that the women was representative of managed care. The Editors at the time did not find the picture offensive. A few weeks later they published a parody of a female trapezes artist who was very obese and grotesque and the article questioned "Do you take good care of your staff". It was obvious the preliminary complaints had fallen on deaf or insensitive ears. If we are going to achieve true equality in medicine, then we must the image of woman with the same dignity and respect with which we treat the image of man. Medicine has been a patriarchical hierarchy for too long. Marjorie L. Shuer, M.D.
Women with talent and creativity have an upward struggle. If they demonstrate their genius they intimidate men, and men rapidly close ranks. This lack of equality is about power differentials and if women are continually portrayed in an less than professional manner (even if it is fine art), it does nothing to overcome stereotypes of the past. As Virgina Woolf so wonderfully described the social forces against women of talent i.e. Shakespeare’s mythical sister in A Room of One’s Own.. "any women born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gifts for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty." Page 49 |
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Wilfred N Arnold, Professor University of Kansas Medical Center
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The article by J.P. Clark raises some interesting gender questions and certainly has a titillating title. However, the methodology of the meagre survey leaves much to be desired. The sweeping conclusions need to be based on more than one year's worth of JAMA covers. Also, there is the question of available material: e.g., some comparisons might have been made with the proportions of Clark's subject categories that occur for example in the Chicago Art Institute, from which many of the covers naturally derive because of the proximity to JAMA headquarters. The costs and enthusiasms of curators vary greatly from one museum to the next and Dr. Clark makes no mention of the manifold difficulties that attend the accession of reproductions of art works. She apparently supposes that they are all there for the taking. The cover editor for JAMA has published her own favorite selections from 1974 to 1987: M. Therese Southgate: The art of JAMA, 221 pp, 104 color illustrations, St. Louis, Mosby 1996. [My review appeared in Modern Pathology 10:295 (1997).] It is indeed curious that this compilation was not similarly analyzed. Wilfred Niels Arnold |
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David H Bevan
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Dear Sir, Publishing Jocalyn P Clark's tendentious study (BMJ 319, p1603-4) - even if intended as vicious satire on philistinism in public health departments, or perhaps in Canada - is inexcusable. The study is uncontrolled; no comparison is made with the pool of art images from which Dr Southgate selects JAMA covers. A selective reading of one reference serves as the only comparator. Clark's methodology has not been tested against a control group such as a the contents of large collections or a systematic catalogue. Failure to compare her study group with the general population from which it is drawn allows no conclusion, as pointed out by Showalter, and the contravention of basic rules of statistical observation calls into question your peer review process when compared to that of JAMA ( helpfully made available by Clark). If this seems an over-heavy response to your "lite" Christmas issue, fie on you for including such a grossly humourless squib. Its publication gratuitously insults an editor and writer whose eye for the lesser-known work of more or less well-known artists is an example of genuine meeting of art and medicine, the subject of much wishful thinking in the BMJ. Read the essays Dr Southgate writes inside the covers: with economy and style she provides information and perception that outwit many published art writers. The cover image and the essay should be read together, since the latter often addresses iconography and other context including the well-known gendering of images in western art: a bias which women artists such as Cindy Sherman have been successful in understanding, explicating and subverting. Their intellectual engagement, however, goes deeper than trivialising depictions of Madonna and Child as "babes and boobs". Clark would evidently prefer that JAMA cover art be replaced by "a list of contents". For this alone, I suggest a course of Art Therapy. David H Bevan
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