When Barbara Hepworth was offered to witness an operation, the idea seemed atrocious. One of her daughters was hospitalized and the truth is that, seeing the plaster from head to toe, the sculptor had noticed the similarity between the shapes of the plaster and her own work in the workshop, but from there to getting into an operating room was a distance he didn’t feel willing to save. Perhaps out of deference to the art-loving surgeon who had helped not only heal the girl but to meet the costs of treatment, she finally agreed and in 1947 attended the first operation, not without first making sure. an escape route “in case he was unable to bear the scene.” It was not necessary to flee because what he saw captivated Hepworth in form and substance: refined figures, matched under gowns and surgical masks and absorbed in a script based on the constraint of each moment as much as on the eternal conflict between life and death, Although that first operation was nothing more than a routine hip operation. The exact choreography of each movement, the common effort of the medical team, the rhythm and the tension between looks and hands shared for her the timelessness of a hagiography of Masaccio or Della Francesca and the transcendence of a classic frieze. “There is an affinity between what doctors and artists do,” he later reflected. “Both professions start from a vocation of inexcusable consequences and both require manual dexterity. Medicine seeks to restore body and mind; like Art“Never lose sight of an ideal and combine science and ideas in favor of a better understanding of life.”
The result of this fascination was almost three years of work, sessions of nine hours in a row in the operating room and eighty ‘Hospital Drawings’, which are one of the most distinctive sections of his work. Some are quick sketches; others mix oil, enamel, cake, and charcoal to capture meaning-laden scenes almost sacramental that may surprise anyone who has filed Barbara Hepworth in the post-war radical abstraction section.
Even in the aseptic liturgy of a modern operating room the trace of the myth of Persephone and Hades survives. Art reflects the eagerness of human science to understand and master pain, disease, and death from the drawing of Achilles bandaging a wound to Patroclus in a 2,550-year-old kylix, to Hans Baldung’s medieval knight ‘Grien,’ which takes a young woman from the embrace of a skeleton, or ‘The Doctor , Death and the Maiden ‘, which a favorite Hitler painter, Ivo Saliger, depicted as such, like a fight in thrusts and blows.
Art reflects the eagerness of human science to master disease
It was not easy to conclude that this eagerness was worth it; that the disease is caused by natural causes and not by divine will. It is something that, although the result of a process, is often appreciated by Hippocrates, Since to him the decisive impulse is attributed to separate Medicine and Theology for the first time. Of the previous stage the attributes of the remote protectors of the healing last, between a dozen of legend: deities like Apolo, the centaur Chiron and Asclepius, the cane with a coiled serpent continues representing Western Medicine, equal that meanings persist around their daughters Panacea, Egle or Higía, carrier of the curative glass that represents the Pharmacy.
Separating disease and superstition meant in practice laying the foundations of the medical profession. Almost everything that is known about Hippocrates has come through the famous Roman Galen and by him we know that his breadth of interests was enormous and encompassed both the ethical subtleties of the new profession and the convenience of wearing short nails to be a physician. Despite its importance, most representations of the Greek physician are engravings and busts after the seventeenth century and their features indistinguishable from those of any philosopher.
moral strength
What has lasted is the Hippocratic oath that, in either the original version or an updated text, future doctors will continue to take. The statement they assume today is often the oath written in 1964 by Dr. Louis Lasagna, which reflects a current, preventive and holistic view of Medicine without needing to mention Apollo or Asclepius at any time. One of the most striking phrases in this ethical decalogue is “Above all, I must not play God”, an allusion to the particular mixture of humility and moral strength required by the practice of Medicine. and a wake-up call to the responsibility that the medical professional bears when, in extreme cases, he or she has to make difficult decisions in a matter of seconds. The ‘Portrait of Dr. Gross’, controversial from the moment Thomas Eakins presented it in 1876 at the Centenary exhibition, was rejected precisely because of the protagonist’s attitude and the harshness of the scene in eyes of an audience that was not accustomed to watching operations in film or television and called Eakins a butcher. The doctor, with an ambiguous expression, has just retired from the operating table. His gesture is unfathomable and the atmosphere of the scene is very different from that breathed in such remarkable precedents as the ‘Dr. Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson’, which had provided almost immediate prestige to Rembrandt when he was only 26 years old. . Nor does the bloodied hand of a doctor, with the scalpel, as they say, still hot and dressed, like his assistants, in street clothes, help. However, the painting is a faithful testimony of the time. Pasteur and Lister had already published consistent results, but it was still a decade before asepsis and white robes reached the operating rooms. Eakins only got $ 200 for the portrait of Gross, which is now a pinnacle of American realism and cost $ 68 million in 2006. The artist had to warn that it was not appropriate to get carried away by the drama and all just ten years later he painted the ‘Portrait of Dr. Agnew’, already in a dressing gown, without blood on his hands and with a more controlled anesthetic system than Gross’s ether-soaked cloth, although there were still a few months left for the novelty of the gloves.
Goya or Frida Kahlo painted several canvases as a tribute to their doctors
From the Enlightenment and especially in the nineteenth century, the medical profession was advancing by leaps and bounds. In ‘The Visit to the Hospital’, painted by Juan Jiménez Aranda in 1889, the daily round of doctors and inmates is seen similar to that of any current university hospital. What is shocking is the old-fashioned auscultation, applying the sense to the patient’s back or chest. Dr. Laennec had died a few years earlier, not without first putting on track an instrument that would soon represent the profession like no other: the stethoscope. Medicine was redefined with each step and the changes were huge in just a decade. Florence Nightingale also laid the foundations of nursing in the middle of the century with her work on the Crimean War, which Jerry Barret portrayed in an epic tone. Cleanliness, ventilation, order, tranquility, left behind the medieval obscurantism dominated by interpretations of the disease as divine punishment. Bosco elevated the recurring phenomenon of the fake doctor, of the chatterbox, to the category of great art on a table painted at the dawn of the 16th century. The ‘Extraction of the Stone of Madness’ was based on a popular belief of the time that other European painters continued to treat until well into the Baroque. In a cycle about the life of an Italian saint, Pietro Lorenzetti had reflected in 1341 another inseparable aspect of medicine, but which has seldom dealt with art. This is medical eviction; the moment when a doctor has to give up in the face of illness. The Sienese painter had expressed it with a shrug that is probably unique in the history of painting.
Gratitude and admiration
Much more common is the feeling of gratitude and admiration for the doctor. Of the two times Goya was on the verge of death, the first was at the age of 46 and meant hearing loss which, according to his biographies, affected his way of painting. The second was already 73 years old and this time the Aragonese was aware of the crucial intervention of his doctor, Dr. Arrieta, to save his life. In gratitude, he painted a canvas linking with the votive offering tradition. He imagines himself ill, barely put to bed while the doctor administers him a medicine and the blurred figures in the background, perhaps the Parks, return to the shadows from where they came out.
As her medical history testifies, few artists have suffered such painful and prolonged health problems as Frida Kahlo. the painter Mexican also wanted to pay tribute on several canvases to some of her doctors, Dr. Farill and, above all, the prestigious thoracic surgeon Leo Eloesser, who was a close friend of both Frida and Diego Rivera. Joaquim Sorolla painted several portraits of doctors. Among them are two magnificent canvases by his friend Dr. Simarro. In one he represents the great researcher with several colleagues in the laboratory and in the other, in the microscope at his desk. Despite not being his personal physician, the painter’s admiration is evident. A little more ambiguous is the tribute Richard Dadd paid to his psychiatrist, Dr. Alexander Morison. After killing his father at the instigation of the devil, the painter had been incarcerated in Bedlam for many years when he painted this enigmatic medical portrait.
It would be difficult to deduce the professional prestige of Dr. Samuel Pozzi from the superb portrait that Singer Sargent painted in 1881. However, the exquisiteness of the red-robed dandy does not obscure his outstanding work in the consultation. Pozzi’s social and professional prominence has its counterpart in the figure of an anonymous rural doctor, who with cold, heat, day or night goes out on the road to perform an essential task. Samuel Luke Fildes depicted this figure on a famous 1891 canvas that has become an icon of medical commitment. Its success was such that in 1949 it was reproduced in 65,000 panels to protest the nationalization of health care in the United States. “Let’s keep politics out of this picture,” said the slogan, which was no obstacle to the fact that it soon also served to celebrate British public health.