How medical illustration distorts the facts

How medical illustration distorts the facts

As soon as art is used to explain science a rift opens up between reality and the image.  

This happens in human biology for a variety of reasons.

1. Biological events happen in complete darkness: hormone secretion, clot formation and the pumping of the heart happen deep inside the body where there is no light and no convenient gaps between the organs. The heart is wrapped around by the lungs, the pancreas is beside the liver and the duodenum. In order to see the actions of a single organ you need to isolate it from its surroundings but the movement of the lungs influences the emptying of the heart. Even an endoscope inside a blood vessel cannot see the vessel wall unless the blood is flushed out of the system. That's why radiologists use contrast medium to create a 3D image of the circulation.
   
2. Most biological events are too small to see with the naked eye or the optical microscope, so we need to construct an image to describe what is happening on a scale of nanometers [one millionth of a meter] or molecular events at the level of picometers, maybe sometimes at a sub-atomic layer in the case of changes in quantum physics which occur inside the body. 
   
   
   
3. When events like clotting are scaled up so we can observe them there are deliberate mistakes in scale; to show platelets and the vessel wall in the same image, one molecule of haemoglobin is made to look huge in comparison to one red cell.
   
   
   
4. Biological events, like the pumping of the heart are dynamic, changing in a rhythmic cycle over seconds, hours and a whole day. So to capture what's happening you can opt for a snapshot like a sagittal CT scan or use ultrasound to record an echocardiogram over several seconds to observe dynamic emptying and filling. Either way, it's a compromise between accurate anatomy and indicators of function.
5. Biological events such as brain activity involve multiple processes which all happen simultaneously. During brain activity the blood supply increases, brain cells fire off electrical impulses, chemicals: neurotransmitters are released and the whole process goes on an anatomical structure which is unique to every individual. The brain cells are bathed by a constantly changing symphony of locally released and systemic hormones. But we can only measure one change at once; measuring the electrical activity would disturb the magnetic radiation scan of the brain. The constantly changing level of transmitters is not recordable in life.  

For all these reasons, the medical imagery used in videos is based on distortions: at the macro level by the results of dissection of dead bodies, X-rays, ultrasound and at the micro level by laboratory studies of tissues and cellular processes.

My point is that none of these methods of illustration can be explanatory of daily events in the human body such as breathing, clotting, fatigue and thinking.  It's not the fault of illustrators; it's a result of the hyper-specialism of scientists who can only attribute health or disease to a factor within their specialty: a single electronic charge, a neurotransmitter, a change in structure or a pretty pattern on scans and not combinations of several of them simultaneously which our cells take for granted.