For every issue, the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases prints a different work of art on the cover. That may seem a bit non-sequiturish, but the pieces are actually carefully chosen to illustrate the theme of the issue. Better yet, the editors of Emerging Infectious Diseases take a page to explain the connections, which usually include some interesting segues into the history of art and medical science.
For instance, the issue above is on respiratory disease, and features a print of Thomas Hart Benton's Interior of a Farmhouse. Emerging Infectious Diseases waxes poetic:
Interior of a Farmhouse on this month's cover offers a glimpse of the brilliant color, energy, and movement that characterize Benton's art and the complexity and richness of his murals. The title understates this intricate composition. The farmhouse at center stage anchors a community of scenes connected by a fence here, a doorway there, an angle, a partial wall, and contains his favorite people: workers doing what they do in the kitchen, the barn, the fields, at rest. On the periphery, steamboat navigation and the wheels of industry are rolling, their ubiquitous smokestacks belching above the Missouri River. Court is in progress; a worker reads the daily news; another washes up; animals wander in and outdoors. The painter reviews American industry in the 1930s, which pulsates, as if it were a live, breathing organism itself.
The values of honest living and hard labor, at the heart of Benton's work, went hand in hand with the belief that harmony between humans and nature resided on the farm, the interior of which in this painting is not altogether filled with agrarian bliss. Despite the energy emanating from the vibrant community, there are tensions, political and ecologic undertones, part and parcel of industrialization. Benton the social historian sensed the dark side of factories and increased transportation, which he noted in palpable terms, a cloud so menacing against the pristine horizon it unfolded half way across the painting.
"The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes/…Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys/," Benton's fellow Missourian T.S. Eliot wrote prophetically in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." As they settle, the dark plumes from smokestacks, a fixture in the artist's work signaling the machine's intrusion, cause havoc in the farmhouse. "The harmony man had with his environment has broken down," he wrote. "Now men build and operate machines they don't understand and whose inner workings they can't even see."
Choked by industrial and other pollution, we have come to resemble Benton's farmhouse, an organism under stress, because "man doesn't escape his environment."
You can see—and read about—covers dating back to 1997 on the journal's website.
