IDOMED and Instituto Yduqs published a fake clinical textbook to expose racism in medicine

Brazilian medical schools, like most worldwide, built their diagnostic reference materials around one default patient: white skin. Rashes, cyanosis, jaundice, and dozens of other textbook-classic presentations were illustrated almost exclusively on light skin, a well-documented gap in dermatology and general medical training globally. In Brazil, where roughly half the population is Black or mixed-race, doctors trained this way misread or delayed diagnosis in Black patients — the exact failure IDOMED and Instituto Yduqs's diversity program was created to address.

Rather than run an awareness campaign, agency Artplan built Nigrum Corpus — Latin for 'Black body' — a hardback publication designed exactly like a clinical reference text, describing 20 fictionalized pathologies grounded in hundreds of hours of research and real patient testimony, paired with a short film following a Black patient's treatment in a Brazilian hospital. The device borrows medicine's own visual authority — typography, anatomical plates, dosage charts — to diagnose the field's blind spot in its own language.

built a fake clinical textbook of 20 Black 'pathologies'

The clinical textbook format already carries authority for doctors, so borrowing it made the message credible.

Grounding the fictional pathologies in real patient testimony let the book withstand the same scrutiny as a real reference.

The book fit into doctors' existing routine, being shelved and assigned alongside other texts, not as a separate campaign.

The format itself did the persuasive work, reaching doctors without requiring a competing claim on their attention.

When a field's reference materials encode a biased default, fix the materials themselves rather than just training people to remember the exception.

Per agency and independent trade-press reporting, the book has been adopted as supplementary teaching material by roughly 32 Brazilian universities, reportedly reaching over 9,000 medical students across 10-plus states, and was shared with Brazil's Ministry of Health — though being shared with the ministry is not the same as an official protocol change, and these figures come from agency and press coverage rather than an independent academic audit. The project became the first Brazilian creative work to win two Cannes Lions Grand Prix, in Industry Craft (2025) and Glass: The Lion for Change (2