Hand-eye coordination

It’s been a humbling spring here at Yale Medicine headquarters. Just when we thought we had come up with the perfect design for the magazine, a number of letters and comments pointed out a small flaw in our master plan. A tiny flaw. A miniscule yet serious flaw, if one takes one’s mail to heart, as we do. “Yale Medicine is attractive in layout. I am very interested in reading it but am unable to do so,” Thomas L. Buckey, M.D. ’43 Dec., wrote. “The design and type selection must have been made by a very young person and amounts to elder abuse.” He was only half joking.

I phoned Dr. Buckey as this issue was in layout stage to assure him that none of us on the magazine’s staff is a day under 40, that many of us have failing eyesight and that we have come to agree that the type shrank a little too much during Yale Medicine’s redesign last autumn. Readers will notice a significant increase in the type size in this issue, and our page format is returning to a full 8.5-by-11 inches to accommodate the change. The Summer issue is also a bit lighter than our other three, down to 32 pages from our normal 48 or more, as is befitting the season. The Autumn 2002 issue, with a beefed-up alumni section and complete reunion coverage, will return to full strength.

This edition’s main feature story continues our “Letter from …” series with a narrative by second-year medicine resident Monique Tello, M.D., from her experience working in a pediatric burn unit in Guatemala City. Medicine is increasingly crossing borders geographic, political and cultural, and given Yale’s international focus at the start of its fourth century, the “Letter from …” articles have been enormously popular. If you have such a story, please share it with us.

Meanwhile we’ll keep our eyes on the big picture as well as the fine print, responding to your interests and concerns as alumni. “No, you don’t have to send a large-print edition—just a normal-size print one,” Dr. Buckey wrote.

Done.