As proposed in the classic work by Hervey Cleckley, M.D.— The Mask of Sanity—a psychopath typically meets sixteen diagnostic criteria. Every one of them applies to Richard Hickock as he is revealed by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a nonfiction novel about the murder of Kansas farmer Herbert W. Clutter and his family forty years ago. It transcends the boundaries of traditional journalism by closely examining the entire constellation of antisocial personality traits that Hickock exhibits. Drawn in large part from jailhouse interviews, Capote's portrait of Hickock breathes life into the psychiatric literature, thus rendering intelligible the mental evaluation provided by the physician who examined the accused in preparation for his upcoming trial. In so doing, Capote's best-selling masterpiece serves as a case study of a psychopath, one that conforms to established medical authority while maintaining its popular appeal.

One method of assessing the opinions that physicians hold about science writers is to examine the public record, represented by two periodicals: the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. The citations to the news media that appear in the indexes of the two journals during the last fifteen years yield thirty-four opinion pieces, consisting of editorials and letters to the editor. The timing and content of medical news are of particular concern to physicians. Specifically, they watch for violations of the Ingelfinger Rule and the press embargo system—policies designed to ensure that physicians have access to medical information before it becomes widely disseminated to the general public—as well as errors of medical fact.

Over a quarter century ago, James W. Carey and John J. Quirk questioned the prevailing belief that technology would revolutionize communication. Now that we have begun traveling on the information superhighway, we are bombarded more often than ever by what Carey and Quirk called “the rhetoric of the electronic sublime.” Yet an exploration of some fifty award-winning health messages on the World Wide Web suggests that our well-worn maps—that is, the traditional concepts of source, content, purpose, audience, and presentation—can give us a sense of direction as we begin our fall down the rabbit-hole.