Chidiebere Ibe spent 2020 learning how to create medical illustrations showing Black bodies. The illustration of Black fetus in the womb went viral.
“I wasn’t expecting it to go viral,” Ibe, a pediatric neurosurgeon student, told NBC News. The 25-year-old from Nigeria, has a chemistry degree from the University of Uyo in Nigeria, is set to enter Kyiv Medical University in Ukraine in January. Ibe’s illustrations went viral after a Twitter user shared some of his work.
“I’ve literally never seen a Black foetus illustrate before, ever,” the user wrote. The tweet garnered got over 50,000 retweets and over than 300,000 likes.
Ibe is also the creative director and chief medical illustrator of the Journal of Global Neurosurgery. He said he first got interested in creating medical illustrations after noticing illustrations he saw while working with the Association of Future African Neurosurgeons didn’t depict Black skin.
Ibe’s website features anatomical illustrations and depictions of medical conditions using Black bodies.
Medical professionals praised Ibe’s illustrations on social media. “We need diversity in our medical textbooks and patient resources,” Prof Kamlesh Khunti, a diabetes and vascular medicine specialist in the U.K. wrote.
“Little did I understand what the drawing meant to a lot of people. On my LinkedIn, on my Twitter, on my Instagram, I read the comments and they really touched me. I was crying,” Ibe told NBC News. “It was amazing to see how good people felt about it. People could see themselves in the drawing.”
An analysis of medical textbooks by a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania discovered that between 4 percent and 18 percent of images showed dark skin.
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