Sunday, January 26, 2025

Medicine in Art

Since every one of my Missives must start somewhere this one occurred to me as I signed up for a “Concierge” doctor. On account of all the paperwork and little money a doctor can make on Medicare or in a small or poor town the overhead is crushing so to make up for it a doctor has to see too many patients to practice the art of medicine and not just the science. From the National Library of Medicine: “… The art and science of medicine are complementary. For successful practice, a doctor must be an artist armed with basic scientific knowledge in medicine.”

The “art of medicine” is usually defined in terms of the interpersonal skills and empathy that doctors use to treat patients. However, having been involved in the “fine” arts all my life I began to think about the depiction of medicine in art and how far back it has gone. In this Fresco depicting Lapyx removing an arrowhead from Aeneas’ thigh is from the first century (between 45 & 79 CE).


There is a long history of art used as illustration for medical instruction. I learned from an article by Alexandra Cook,“Medicine in Art History” from the University of Arizona College of Medicine that “Medical illustration was a method of disseminating knowledge in the early days. Hellenic Alexandria in the early 3rd century BC was a hub for medical research where many began drawing on various topics, including anatomy, surgery, and obstetrics, and documenting plants that had medicinal properties ... During the Middle Ages while Europe was falling into the Dark Ages, much of medical knowledge and study was preserved in the Muslim world.” A print dating from 1493 illustrates the Alexandria School of Medicine.

An article for the International Business Times illustrates a document from the University of North Carolina Libraries, MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical illustrations and states, “Forget the Sitz bath, Medieval manuscripts reveal that 12th-century surgeons would treat severe hemorrhoids by burning them away with a cautery iron”. You may be surprised to learn that cauterizing hemorrhoids only fell away in the mid-20th century!


It is interesting to compare two images of the operating theater, one from Holland in the 17thCentury and the other from the 19th century in France. The first is, of course, a detail from Rembrandt’s famous Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632 in the Mauritshuis. The other from the Musée d’Orsay by Henri Gervex, Before the Operation, 1887. In both cases all the students are standing around to learn more about the human body and skill of the doctor. Today, I presume they would all be wearing white coats and masks.



If you are old enough, you remember the days when the doctor came dressed in his business suit with his black medical bag to your home to see how you were doing and prescribe any necessary medicines. You can see such an example in this Jan Steen of 1660, one of several of his depictions of the subject. Though Steen’s scenes are usually interpreted as the diagnosis of pregnancy, I still remember such visits in the 20th century for other complaints!


Dr. Paul Kolker, M.D., J.D., an accomplished cardiovascular surgeon, attorney, and visual artist, makes the case for the appreciation of fine art in helping doctors connect with patients, creating the empathy that aids diagnosis and improves convalescence. I want to end with his four-minute video from the Foundation on the Art of Healing and “The Physician as Artist, the Artist as Physician”. 

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