Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Wrong Way Wooten

Dear Dr. Lazar,

One of my readers noticed an ad for your recently published book:





I'd like to make 2 points (so to speak).

1. While your book is on stomach cancer, and I understand anatomy is important, the breasts seem unusually voluptuous detailed for a book that focuses on an entirely different organ system.

2. In a book about stomach cancer, some details are more important than others. The anatomy of the stomach, for example, is pretty critical. And in this case, your cover art has it backwards. So, unless you've got an exceedingly rare patient born with reversal of the internal organs, or a previously undescribed form of malignancy that causes them to rotate a perfect 180°... I'd break out your Netter.

Thank you, Robyn!

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love how the mammary duct work is painstakingly detailed yet the intestines look like my 3 year old's random scribbles. Because clearly the stomach and intestines are not closely related in the digestive system.

Hildy said...

So sex sells...even for a medical text?

Crazy RxMan said...

It's alllll good: you saw boobs.

Ms. Donna said...

Ah, does not look like any xray I've seen (Usually boobs are squashed flat) but I MUST be female. I saw the stomach was on the wrong side before noticing anything else,

oh well.

Yes, sex sells, see how it got all the male medical professionals going. Thanks Dr. G. I have an GYN appointment soon and now I have to think of this!

Anonymous said...

I can haz MD from Internet?

Anonymous said...

I love it!!! I'm going to Barnes and Noble right now to buy a copy!

Patti Cadwallader said...

I was wondering what that was right under the pointy boob. Some people will do anything to sell a book.

Anonymous said...

Do you think the artist is a male?

KL said...

Some clueless editor/art director has flipped the image horizontally-- notice the liver is also reversed. The 3D model itself is correct and likely a stock body with all organ systems set to a transparent/glass material, hence the visibility of the unrelated organs (and perky sexy breasts). The intestines look like scribbles because they have so many overlapping edges. Certainly this cover was done on the fly and at low budget.

Actually I think my biggest criticism might be the lazily modeled "tumor", which due to its location looks more like a food bolus than a tumor mass.

Sincerely,
Your friendly local medical illustrator

Anonymous said...

Unless they are self-publishing, authors rarely get a veto over cover art, and may not even get to see it before it is too late to change.

Dr Lazar is probably entirely blameless. Dr Grumpy, please re-address your letter to her publishers.

Thank you.

Anonymous said...

This looks like the same artist I saw in a publication about liver cancer. In the illustration, the liver was a SMALL thing stuck in the LEFT upper quadrant with a similar starburst in it. It occurs to me that medical illustrators (not Gray, of course) think that the human body is boring as it naturally occurs and it is their job to shake things up artistically. Maybe we should arrange for these particular illustrators to have their organs rearranged to match their vision. TCG

Anonymous said...

My guess is the doctor's trophy wife was the model so he could say he "showed her off" in his newest book.

Anonymous said...

KL,

I was going to say the same.

- Yet another MI.

Unknown said...

Mrs Spock, I presume?

Andrew_M_Garland said...

If you like that book cover, then you might like this pioneering project in x-ray cheesecake.

EIZO X-ray Pinup Girl

EasyOpinions

Anonymous said...

One of these things relate to the topic of the article. Guess which one? (The organ that sort of looks like a stomach was just thrown in to make it relevant.)

Loren Pechtel said...

I'll third KL and Anonymous, this is the fault of the publisher, not the author.

It's almost certainly a stock image and flipped to make it look better--by someone who doesn't know enough anatomy to know you can't just flip an image of the torso.

 
Locations of visitors to this page