Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Rembrandt

  • Rembrandt: Tobias Healing His Father’s Blindness

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s Tobias Healing his Father’s Blindness, painted in 1636, depicts the climactic moment in the Book of Tobit when Tobias returns to his father’s home and instills the gall (bile) he had taken from a giant fish into his blind father’s eyes, thereby restoring his sight.1…

  • Strabismo di Venere—Michelangelo’s David

    Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, United States It is one of the most recognizable sculptures in Western art, the work of an acclaimed Renaissance artist. For over 600 years, it has been viewed by millions of tourists and by millions more in photographs or books. Yet until recently, an obvious physical abnormality had gone largely unrecognized.…

  • Evidence of a skull trepanning

    Alexandru Gh. Sonoc Sibiu, Romania   Unknown man with a white feather Christopher Paudiss (1618-1666) Oil on fire wood panel Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, Romania The man shown here wears a blue velvet hat with a white feather and a brown-reddish cloak. Around his neck he has a brocade scarf in red, ocher, and blue.…

  • Art and Medicine

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, England Art has been said to deepen compassion for suffering.1 Paintings have been interpreted as “metaphors for human feelings . . . they are nonliteral symbols of the inner life.”2 Paintings trigger emotions and insights, “generating associations and tapping new, different, or deeper levels of meaning.”3 It is inherent in all the arts…

  • Rembrandt—The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp

    Tan ChenGrand Rapids, Michigan, United States Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp depicts a rare occasion of a public dissection in Amsterdam in 1632. This painting was commissioned by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons during the time Dr. Tulp held the office of Praelector in Anatomy. Dr. Tulp, a well-known civic leader and…

  • The body vanished: Sebald’s view of dissection in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp

    Jennifer XuGrand Rapids, Michigan, United States Every January, Dr. Tulp gave anatomy lessons to the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons at the Waaggebouw amphitheater that “were not only of the greatest interest to a student of medicine” but also of considerable fascination to a larger audience “that saw itself as emerging from the darkness into the…

  • Surgeon’s hands in Vesalius’s portraits and Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp

    Adéla Janíčková Prague, Czech Republic Fig 1: Anon, Frontispiece, 1543. From Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, 1543 “To extol the human hand as a monument to God’s wisdom, an instrument that permits humans to create civilization” This statement by Dolores Mitchell1 describes the human hand as both a monument to divinity and an…