Category: Art Flashes
-
Illness or intoxication? Diagnosing a French clown
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, USA In his day, Thomas Couture was a renowned history painter, though his students would later surpass him in fame—the likes of Edouard Manet and John Lafarge. Born in the small French town of Senlis, his parents moved to Paris when he was a child so he could study art. He attended…
-
A physician examining a patient’s urine
This painting from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford shows a physician uroscopist examining a specimen of urine in order to determine what was ailing his patient. It is a serious painting, unlike that of Dutch artists such as Jan Steen who regarded uroscopists as quacks and made fun of their pretentious mien and attire. The…
-
Edvard Munch: sickness and death
These two paintings by the famous Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) reflect his lifelong melancholia and obsession with sickness and death. This has been attributed to his childhood experiences of his father’s drifting towards insanity, his mother’s death from tuberculosis, and the later death of two siblings from the same disease. Melancholia affected the artist…
-
Los Caprichos
This is engraving number 40 from the Los Caprichos series by Francisco de Goya, published in 1799 and showing a donkey as a doctor attending a dying man in his bed. The doctor wears a watch to count the patient’s pulse but not a stethoscope because this had not yet been invented. It suggests that the…
-
The Agnew Clinic
The Agnew Clinic (or The Clinic of Dr. Agnew) is an oil painting by American artist Thomas Eakins. It was commissioned by the class of 1889 of the University of Pennsylvania medical students to honor the anatomist and surgeon David Hayes Agnew on his retirement from teaching. It depicts Dr. Agnew performing a partial mastectomy in a…
-
Gerrit Dou and his Netherlandish quacks
Gerrit Dou (1613-1675), one of Rembrandt’s first students, was born thirteen years before his contemporary Jan Steen and died four years before him. Both painted similar works of contrasting light and dark, both lived most of their lives in Leiden, and both included in their work several scenes illustrating healthcare in the Netherlands in the…
-
The tooth pullers
Having a tooth pulled in the days before the advent of modern anesthesia and dental techniques could turn out to be a pretty ghastly experience. There was a time when it was done by barbers, by itinerant tooth drawers, or even by blacksmiths. In the village, teeth were often extracted in full view of the…
-
Jan Steen: Quack doctors visit lovesick maidens
Like his contemporary Molière, the Dutchman Jan Steen makes fun of quack doctors, often shown in ridiculous costumes visiting young love-sick or pregnant women. In the Lovesick Maiden (Fig.1, Metropolitan Museum) the diagnosis is suggested by the painting of a Cupid above the door, the bed on the right, and the bed-warmer on the lower…