Tag: Art Flashes
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Mantegna’s coral aorta
At first sight this coral in Andrea Mantegna’s painting looks like an abdominal aorta, the Superior Mesenteric Artery arising at its upper end, other branches from lower down. Corals are the products of minute marine sack-like organisms that live in compact colonies or reefs, secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton, and may grow…
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Saint Peter and Hansen’s disease?
Did Saint Peter have leprosy, or perhaps some other cause of injury to the ulnar nerve? It would seem so, according to Dr. Bennett Futterman, professor of anatomy in New York. In a recent book he points out that the traditional blessing of the Pope—ring and little finger bent inward as in the clawhand deformity…
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Hospital at Arles – Van Gogh, 1889
The famous Impressionist painter Van Gogh has had much personal experience with hospitals and asylums, admitted repeatedly in Arles and St Rémy for episodes of mental illness. Over 150 psychiatrists have variously attributed his mental condition to schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, syphilis, temporal lobe epilepsy, acute porphyria, or heavy metal poisoning—aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia, alcohol,…
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Caduceus versus the Staff of Asclepius
This painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art is attributed to Gaspare Pagani, a relatively obscure sixteenth century artist from Modena, Italy, the world capital of balsamic vinegar. It shows an elderly man carrying a staff with two serpents coiled around it, serving to identify him as a physician. The man has made no momentous…
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Lorenzo Lotto: Portrait of a surgeon
During his long peripatetic career the Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto produced two paintings of medical interest, both in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The earlier painting, also shown as an Art Flash (qv), is of the physician, Giovanni Agostino della Torre and his son Niccolò, dated 1513. This painting, dated 1544, is…
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Saint Peter Martyr
Saint Peter Martyr, 1205-1252, was a Verona born Dominican friar who became Papal Inquisitor and preached against prevailing heresies. Killed by an assassin, who struck his head with an axe, he was canonized by Pope Innocent IV within one year of his death. While alive, he had many miracles attributed to him. The painting from the Metropolitan Museum in…
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Dr. Ralph Schomburg, a fashionable physician
This painting by Thomas Gainsborough is from the National Gallery in London. It shows the physician, Dr. Ralph Schomburg (1714–1792). While residing in Bath, Dr. Schomburg attended on Gainsborough himself as well as on his daughters. Story has it that Gainsborough painted this portrait in lieu of paying the doctor’s fee. It is reported that…
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Théodore Géricault: Kleptomania
Kleptomania is defined as a recurrent compulsion to steal. Affected persons often act on impulse and are not motivated by economic necessities. They tend not to use the objects they steal but may return them, hide them, or throw them away. They seem to get gratification from the very act of stealing, or at least…
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Saint Roch
Saint Roch is the patron saint of dogs, bachelors, surgeons, tile makers, invalids, and diseased cattle. He helps pilgrims and is invoked against epidemics and diseases of the skin. In the Italian Renaissance painting by Giovanni Buonconsiglio (ca. 1465, ca. 1535) he is shown in traveling attire, pointing at his plague bubo, in company of…
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Saints Cosmas and Damian, patron saints of doctors
Unlike many other doctors, Cosmas and Damian were also saints. They lived in what today is modern Turkey, where they practiced healing the sick. They may also have been color blind (!), replacing (as in the paintings shown here) a patient’s gangrenous leg with one of the wrong color. But the Florentine Filippo Lippi clearly…