The Gross Clinic
look familiar?
this is a portrait of Dr. Gross, an American academic trauma surgeon lecturing a group of Jefferson Medical College students. It was painted by Thomas Eakins in 1875.
"Admired for its uncompromising realism, The Gross Clinic has an important place documenting the history of medicine-both because it honors the emergence of surgery as a healing profession (previously, surgery was associated primarily with amputation), and because it shows us what the surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century. The painting is based on a surgery witnessed by Eakins, in which Gross treated a young man for osteomyelitis of the femur. Gross is pictured here performing a conservative operation as opposed to an amputation (which is how the patient would normally have been treated in previous decades). Here, surgeons crowd around the anesthetized patient in their frock coats. This is just prior to the adoption of a hygienic surgical environment (see asepsis). The Gross Clinic is thus often contrasted with Eakins's later painting The Agnew Clinic (1889), which depicts a cleaner, brighter, surgical theater. In comparing the two, we see the advancement in our understanding of the prevention of infection."
the original painting used to hang in the hall in one of my buildings, but in 2006 was sold for $68 million to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
today after clinical we went over to Alumni Hall to visit the little museum that houses 3 replicas of Eakins' work. it also has a ton of creepy horror movie-looking surgical tools from Gross' time.