A journalist from a daily newspaper was one of the teachers at a course on scientific writing. During a break she looked into a thesis overview. (At that time the overview was published separately from the research papers.) She paged through the publication and then said:

Still – about forty years later – in technology, a picture on a thesis cover is seldom seen, nor does one occur often in medicine. However, in biology, it has become the norm.

In biology, an animal studied does not need be camouflaged to be portrayed on the cover. In medicine, the need of disguising a patient studied is a problem. On the next page we have one example of how the problem could be solved – by showing the individual in silhouette (Figure 3.1).