Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Thomas Eakins

  • How black turned white

    Kateryna TsoiKharkiv, Ukraine In 1876, the World’s Fair was held outside Europe for the first time, taking place in Philadelphia and coinciding with the centenary of the US Declaration of Independence. Thomas Eakins, not yet a well-known artist, decided to present a large-scale canvas at the exhibition of a subject he knew well. An ardent…

  • Becoming Judith: The connection between Italian Baroque and anatomy lab

    Emily NghiemDetroit, Michigan, USA Art and medicine are not two things that seem to fall together naturally. When considering an example of medicine depicted in art, a reasonable and literal choice would be Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic, where a team of doctors is performing live surgery before an intently fascinated audience. So many depictions…

  • 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…

  • The Gross Clinic as religious painting: Eakins, affect, and anatomy

    Adam R. ShapiroCambridge, Massachusetts, United States Thomas Eakins’s 1875 painting The Gross Clinic has long been considered one of the great works of nineteenth-century American art. Yet its depiction of a surgical demonstration by Dr. Samuel D. Gross and his colleagues at Jefferson Medical College was controversial from the moment of its completion. It was…