Medical illustrations have a fundamental problem. And it can be fatal.

Less than 5% of medical images show dark skin and only 8% of medical illustrators identify as people of color. This lack of representation leads to biases in the healthcare system, which can lead to misconceptions and dangerous misdiagnosis. To transform representation in healthcare, we created the world’s largest digital library of diverse medical illustrations—open-source and completely free to use for training and education. As a commitment to systemic change, we established the first fellowship to train diverse medical illustrators around the world.

For 2,000 years, medical illustrations have been used for education and training. But these illustrations have depicted mostly white male figures—teaching generations of doctors and patients that white men are the norm. In 2022, an image of a black fetus in-womb created by medical illustrator and medical student Chidiebere Ibe bluntly exposed this issue.

As a global company, Johnson & Johnson works with patient groups, providers, governments, and other stakeholders worldwide to ensure patients have access to affordable, safe, quality health care. To increase diverse representation in medical imagery—and ultimately help improve health outcomes for people of color—Johnson & Johnson partnered with the Association of Medical Illustrators to launch Illustrate Change. And collaborated with Chidiebere Ibe himself and diverse medical illustrators around the world.

Illustrate Change is part of Johnson & Johnson’s Our Race to Health Equity, a bold commitment to create a world where the color of your skin is not a determinant of access to care, treatment, or health outcomes. To increase representation in medical imagery—which leads to better health outcomes for people of color—Johnson & Johnson partnered with the Association of Medical Illustrators to create the world’s largest library of diverse medical illustrations.

The goal was to not only drive long-term change, but also generate instant impact. So, we set out to create hundreds of diverse medical images that for centuries had been missing from healthcare, and to make them instantly available for free to doctors, patients, medical schools, and health institutions around the world.

To fight structural racism in healthcare, we created 125+ new diverse medical images across women’s health, maternal health, cardiology, dermatology, eye disease, hematology, oncology, and orthopedics. Each illustration was reviewed by a bespoke board of 14 doctors, medical affairs specialists, and Health Equity experts to ensure scientific accuracy and anatomical precision.

Open-source and completely free to use for training and education, leading to more accurate diagnosis and better representation in medicine.

As a commitment to lasting impact and to ensure that Illustrate Change will continue to scale for years to come, we established the first fellowship to support and train diverse medical illustrators around the world.

A bespoke logo reimagines medicine’s iconic Rod of Asclepius—with a pencil through the middle, while a nouveau rebus type system brings the illustrations into the headlines.