Letters to the editor

Strunk & White

The summer issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine recently arrived in Portland. While listening to the Orioles beat Oakland, I read your "fantastic" editor's note. It might be, except for using the word pretty to qualify fantastic. Chapter V of The Elements of Style includes this reminder: "Avoid the use of qualifiers." It goes on to say: "Rather, very, little, pretty—these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words." In other words, lose the pretty, save the prose. Keep those issues coming!

Michael G. Sievers, Bus '79 (MS)
Portland, Oregon

Doctor's Note

I just finished reading "The Way Maker," your article on Leslie King Hammond (Summer). I was unaware of Dr. Hammond, even though my daughter is a MICA graduate and I have a more than cursory interest in art. The article was informative—not only about Hammond but also the slow but progressing general awareness of Black and specifically Black female artists. I am writing, however, as a physician who was startled to read that "male physicians advocated for women to give birth lying prone on a bed with their legs in stirrups." That is quite an image, as prone refers to patients lying on their stomachs. The position women were placed in was supine (lying on their back).

Jeffrey L. Marsh, A&S '67, Med '70 (MD)
St. Louis

On Equity

I very much enjoyed "She Dared to Dig" (Summer), the article on Florence Bascom, but one sentence has lingered with me for inaccuracy. "The doors were shut to half the population." While there had been at least one African American graduate student prior to Bascom's admission, I would hardly say the doors were open to all men. According to the university's own website, African American undergraduates were not admitted until 1945 and there was a time of quotas on Jewish students. To say that the doors were shut to half the population in 1891 overlooks a massive part of the institution's history on making progress toward equity.

K'lila Nooning Silver Spring, Maryland

CORRECTIONS:

"Bacteria Are Talking" (Summer) listed the incorrect alma mater for molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler. She is a graduate of UC Davis. Also in "Bacteria Are Talking," the name of the illustrator was misspelled. It is Alex Eben Meyer.