The human body has been depicted in ancient cave‐paintings, in primitively sculpted figures, and through all the ages in various forms of artistic expression. The earliest medical texts were descriptive but not illustrated. Later, as it became clear that knowledge of the human body and all its systems was essential to the practice of healing, texts were accompanied by illustrations which became an integral part of the teaching process. The illustrators included artists, whose interest was primarily artistic, but who were sometimes employed by surgeons or physicians to illustrate their texts. Occasionally, the physicians or scientists accompanied their texts with their own illustrations, and in the last century, medical illustration, in its infinite variety of techniques, has been developed as a profession in its own right. As knowledge was extended, permitted by social and cultural change, as well as by technological advances, the types of illustrations have ranged from gross anatomy through dissections showing the various organ systems, histological preparations, and radiological images, right up to the computerized digital imagery that is available today, which allows both static and dynamic two‐ and three‐dimensional representations to be transmitted electronically across the world in a matter of seconds. The techniques used to represent medical knowledge pictorially have been as varied as the illustrators themselves, involving drawing, engraving, printing, photography, cinematography and digital processing. Each new technique has built on previous experience to broaden medical knowledge and make it accessible to an ever‐widening audience. This vast accumulation of pictorial material has posed considerable problems of storage, cataloguing, retrieval, display and dissemination of the information, as well as questions of ethics, validity, manipulation and reliability. This paper traces these developments, illustrating them with representative examples drawn from the inexhaustible store of documents accumulated over more than two millennia.

The vast amount of published material in clinical and biomedical sciences, and conflicting results on diagnostic and therapeutic procedures may introduce doubts in decision-making for patient care. Information retrieving skills and the critical appraisal of published literature, together with elaboration of practice guidelines based on epidemiological methodology, form the basis of the trend towards evidence-based health care, which aims to overcome these problems. A survey conducted by questionnaire at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center analyzed which types of information sources are considered most relevant and useful for patient care by a cross-section of physicians with varying degrees of experience. They considered review articles and meta-analyses extremely reliable for information purposes, while for practical patient-care purposes they tended to rely more on the opinions of peers and experts. As the requirements of evidence-based health care may influence the attitudes of clinicians to the published literature and its evaluation, they have implications for medical libraries and information centers. Specifically, information specialists will be called upon more and more to impart information-retrieval and critical appraisal skills to clinicians. The involvement of information specialists in information gathering and selection will provide added value to the expertise and knowledge of in-house experts for decision-making.

The human body has been depicted in ancient cave-paintings, in primitively sculpted figures, and through all the ages in various forms of artistic expression. The earliest medical texts were descriptive but not illustrated. Later, as it became clear that knowledge of the human body and all its systems was essential to the practice of healing, texts were accompanied by illustrations which became an integral part of the teaching process. The illustrators included artists, whose interest was primarily artistic, but who were sometimes employed by surgeons or physicians to illustrate their texts. Occasionally, the physicians or scientists accompanied their texts with their own illustrations, and in the last century, medical illustration, in its infinite variety of techniques, has been developed as a profession in its own right. As knowledge was extended, permitted by social and cultural change, as well as by technological advances, the types of illustrations have ranged from gross anatomy through dissections showing the various organ systems, histological preparations, and radiological images, right up to the computerized digital imagery that is available today, which allows both static and dynamic two- and three-dimensional representations to be transmitted electronically across the world in a matter of seconds. The techniques used to represent medical knowledge pictorially have been as varied as the illustrators themselves, involving drawing, engraving, printing, photography, cinematography and digital processing. Each new technique has built on previous experience to broaden medical knowledge and make it accessible to an ever-widening audience. This vast accumulation of pictorial material has posed considerable problems of storage, cataloguing, retrieval, display and dissemination of the information, as well as questions of ethics, validity, manipulation and reliability. This paper traces these developments, illustrating them with representative examples drawn from the inexhaustible store of documents accumulated over more than two millennia.

No abstract