Tag: Art Essays
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Fractured vision: The influence of early medical imaging on the Cubism movement
Jen HeVivian McAlisterLondon, Ontario, Canada The influence of art on medicine has been emphasized—it separates a physician with clinical acumen from a scholar with medical knowledge, as well as man from machine. Less frequently explored is the historic role that medicine and its innovations have played in advancing the arts. In a small provincial village…
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Amedeo Modigliani: Sculptor, were it not for lung disease
Henri ColtIrvine, California, United States In late 1908, a Parisian dermatologist named Paul Alexandre introduced a struggling twenty-four-year-old Jewish-Italian artist named Amedeo Modigliani to a friend with whom the young Italian would soon develop a close relationship, the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1867–1957). Brancusi found Modigliani a studio close to his own at 14 Cité…
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How curious should we be?
Sam WoodworthPortland, Maine, United States Nearly a decade since graduating from medical school, some of the most enduring memories from that formative time are recollections of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as a first-year medical student. Led by a young hospitalist, I attended weekly sessions with a group of other…
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Brushstrokes and benevolence: Thomas Sully, Samuel Coates, and the Pennsylvania Hospital
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States Artist Thomas Sully was born in 1783 in the remote English village of Horcastle, but he would gain fame and fortune in the city where the greatest minds came together to sign the United States Constitution: Philadelphia. Lauded as the “Athens” of North America,1 Philadelphia lured artists seeking commissions from…
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Jane Campbell Munro in Regency India
Stephen MartinThailand Jane Campbell1 (1790–1850) was catapulted from humble beginnings on a farm in Georgian Scotland2 to a life of stresses and medical danger in India. When her uncle died unexpectedly, Jane’s father inherited Craigie House,3 a Scottish mansion by the river in Ayr. At age nineteen, Jane met and married4 a fellow Scot, Colonel…
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Ivan Čobal’s “Blue Wall” at the Maribor University Clinical Centre in Slovenia
Mojca RamšakLjubljana, Slovenia Patients, physicians, and staff at Maribor University Clinical Centre pass an extraordinary piece of artwork each day: a blue wall made of elongated ceramic tiles with welded iron metal reliefs. The “Blue Wall,” officially titled Times Were Better Once (Nekoč so bili boljši časi), is a 3.4 x 16-meter wall featuring two-dimensional…
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Asymmetrical masks of indigenous Alaskan peoples: Do they represent facial paralysis or not?
Peter De SmetNijmegen, Netherlands Asymmetrical masks of indigenous Alaskan peoples have been interpreted time and again as representations of facial paralysis in the biomedical literature.1-8 Among the arguments in favor of this view is that otitis media once was a health concern in Alaska and could have been an important cause of facial paralysis there.3…
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Edvard Munch: Medical portraits
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States The name Edvard Munch usually recalls his masterful painting titled The Scream (fig. 1). This iconic image from 1893 depicts a moody landscape inhabited by a ghostlike, androgynous, wispy figure, facing if not confronting the viewer. Elongated hands frame the head, pressing emphatically on the ears of a hairless ovoid…
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Faustina Maratti’s poem and altarpiece on losing her infant son
Stephen MartinThailand A most unusual altarpiece panel of the Virgin with the infants Christ and John the Baptist came to light recently. (Fig 1) The heavily-sawn pitch pine had an inscription on the back which was difficult to read. Studying the ink writing under violet light, however, it was not hard to make out: Pinxit…