When Barbara Hepworth was asked to attend an operation, she found the idea awful. One of her daughters was hospitalized and the truth is that seeing her in a piece from head to toe, the sculptor noticed the similarity between the shapes of the plaster and his own work in the workshop, but from there to go to a room of operations a distance she did not feel ready to do. Perhaps out of respect for the art-loving surgeon who helped not only heal the girl but also cover the costs of treatment, he finally agreed, and in 1947 he participated in the first operation, not without first providing a cure. escape route “if necessary. unable to bear the scene. There was no need to run, because what he saw captivated Hepworth in form and substance: refined figures, matched under scrubs and surgical masks and absorbed in a scenario based on the urgency of each moment, as well as the eternal conflict between life and deathAlthough the first operation was nothing more than a routine hip operation. The exact choreography of each movement, the joint effort of the medical team, the rhythm and tension between the eyes and hands shared for her the timelessness of a hagiography by Masaccio or Della Francesca and the meaning 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 skills. Medicine seeks to restore the body and mind; just like art, never loses sight of an ideal and combines science and ideas in search of a better understanding of life.
The result of this fascination was almost three years of work, sometimes nine hours in a row in the operating room and eighty “Hospital Drawings”, which are one of the most distinct sections of his work. Some are quick sketches; others mix oil, enamel, pastel and charcoal to capture significant scenes almost sacramental that can surprise anyone with Barbara Hepworth on file 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 effort of human science to understand and master pain, disease and death from the drawing of Achilles bandaging a wound to Patroclus on a 2,550-year-old kylix, to Hans Baldung’s medieval knight “Grien” snatching a young girl from a skeleton or “Doctor, Death and the Virgin” ‘, which Hitler’s favorite painter, Ivo Saliger, described as such, as a push and pull struggle.
Art reflects the effort of human science to dominate disease
It was not easy to conclude that this effort was worthwhile; that the disease arises from natural causes and not from the divine will. It is something that, although it was the result of a trial, Hippocrates is usually thanked, since he is credited with the decisive impetus to separate Medicine and Theology for the first time. From the previous stage, among dozens of legends, remain the attributes of the distant protectors of healing: deities such as Apollo, the centaur Chiron and Asclepius (Aesculapius), whose wrapped serpent staff continues to represent Western medicine, as the meanings around his daughters Panacea persist. , Egle or Higía, the bearer of the healing cup that represents the Pharmacy.
The separation of disease and superstition meant in practice laying the foundations of the medical profession. Almost everything that is known about Hippocrates came from the famous Roman Galen and we know from him that his scope of interests was enormous, encompassing both the ethical beauties of the new profession and the convenience of wearing short nails to be a doctor. Despite its significance, most representations of the Greek physician are engravings and busts after the seventeenth century, and its features are indistinguishable from those of any philosopher.
Moral power
What he endured is the Hippocratic oath that future doctors, either in the original version or in an updated text, continue to take. The statement I make today is often the oath taken in 1964 by Dr. Louis Lasagna, which reflects a current, preventive and holistic view of medicine without the need to mention Apollo or Asclepius at any time. One of the expressions that draws attention in this ethical decalogue is “Above all, I must not play God,” an allusion to the particular mixture of humility and moral strength that the practice of medicine requires. and a wake-up call about the responsibility of the medical professional when, in extreme cases, he has to make difficult decisions in seconds. The controversial “Portrait of Dr. Gross” when Thomas Eakins presented it at the Centennial in 1876 was rejected precisely because of its protagonist’s attitude and the harshness of the scene in the eyes of an audience unfamiliar with film or television operations. he called Eakins a butcher. The doctor, with an ambiguous expression, had just left the operating table. His gesture is incomprehensible, and the atmosphere of the scene is quite different from that of some remarkable precedents such as “Dr. Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson,” which had given Rembrandt prestige almost immediately when he was only 26 years old. Even the doctor’s bloody hand does not help, with the scalpel, as they say, still warm and dressed, like his assistants, in street clothes. However, the painting is a faithful testimony of the time. Pasteur and Lister had already published consistent results, but another decade passed before asepsis and white coats reached the operating rooms. Eakins received only $ 200 for his portrait of Gross, which today is a summit of North American realism and cost $ 68 million in 2006. The artist should have warned that it was not convenient to let go of the drama and only ten years later he painted ‘Portrait of Doctor Agnew’, already in a dress, without blood on his hands and with a more controlled anesthetic system than the cloth soaked in Gross ether, although there were 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 advanced by leaps and bounds. In “Visit to the Hospital”, painted by Juan Jiménez Aranda in 1889, the daily round of the doctor and the trainees is seen similar to that of any current university hospital. What is striking is the old-fashioned auscultation, applying the ear to the patient’s back or chest. Dr. Laennec died a few years earlier, not before leaving behind an instrument that will soon represent the profession like no other: the stethoscope. Medicine has been redefined at every step, and the changes have been enormous in just a decade. Florence Nightingale also laid the foundations of healthcare in the middle of the century, with her works on the Crimean War, which Jerry Barret interpreted in epic tones. Cleanliness, ventilation, order, tranquility, in the background, was the medieval obscurantism dominated by interpretations of the disease as a divine punishment. Bosco elevated the recurring phenomenon of the fake doctor, of the charlatan, to the category of great art on a panel 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 the Baroque. In a cycle about the life of an Italian saint, Pietro Lorenzetti had reflected in 1341 another inseparable aspect of medicine, but that art was rarely dealt with. It is about medical evacuation; the moment a doctor has to give up the disease. 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 occasions when Goya was on the verge of death, the first was when he was 46 years old and led to hearing loss which, according to his biographies, affected his way of painting. The second was already 73 years old and on that occasion the Aragonese were aware of the crucial intervention of his doctor, Dr. Arrieta, to save his life. As a token of gratitude, he painted a canvas that ties in with the tradition of the votive offering. He is ill, barely sitting in bed, while the doctor takes a medicine, and the blurred figures in the background, maybe fate, return to the shadows they come from.
As her medical history attests, few artists have suffered from such painful and prolonged health problems as Frida Kahlo. painter Mexicana 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. . Joaquín Sorolla painted several portraits of doctors. Among them are two magnificent paintings by his friend Dr. Simarro. In one he represents the great researcher with several colleagues in the laboratory and in the other, under a microscope at his desk. Although he is not his personal doctor, the painter’s admiration is obvious. Somewhat 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 was imprisoned 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 refinement of the dandy in the red coat does not tarnish his remarkable office work. Pozzi’s social and professional prominence has its counterpart in the figure of the anonymous rural doctor, who, cold, hot, day or night, goes out to perform an essential job. Samuel Luke Fildes depicted this figure on a famous 1891 canvas that became an icon of medical engagement. Its success was such that in 1949 it was reproduced on 65,000 billboards protesting against the nationalization of health care in the United States. “Let’s keep politics out of this picture,” read the slogan, which did not stop it from serving shortly afterwards to celebrate British public health.