Visuals and stories: Privacy, consent and anonymity in medical publications

Abstract: Historically, medical journals and books were read by clinicians in medical school libraries. Today, virtually all journals have a web presence and book access has greatly expanded. With case histories and clinical images globally accessible, issues of patient privacy, consent and anonymity have become even more salient.

Speaker #1: will discuss the ethics and aesthetics of the anonymization of patient photographs in medical journals in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, tying the visual trends and techniques of anonymization to ethical questions of masking and revealing patients' faces.

Speaker #2: will examine journal publication of family pedigrees - graphic visual representations of data intended to present information quickly and clearly about the proband within a family. The speaker will discuss the privacy risks and consent issues raised by third-party inclusion.

Speaker #3: will discuss the broad spectrum of how medical journals handle patient privacy in narrative publications, with some journals requiring patient consent and not allowing composite characters, others allowing fictionalized details, etc. The speaker will discuss implications for patient privacy and re-identification risks.

Speaker #4: will discuss concerns raised by concealing identities as an academic and as an editor-in-chief of a clinical ethics journal. Next, the speaker will discuss when the professional becomes personal, describing an invitation to submit a nude photo of the speaker for a book cover to share in the experience of patients whose nude photos are published in medical texts. Attendees will be asked what they would have done before the speaker reveals what actually happened.

Keywords: First- and third-person consent, The professional and the personal, Publication ethics