Medicine on Canvas

On 27 March 2004, the Hektoen Institute and the Martin D'Arcy Museum of Art, Loyola University Chicago, presented an academic symposium on art and medicine entitled "Medicine on Canvas. Interactions between Art and Medicine." Over 140 persons attended the one-day symposium at Loyola University Chicago's downtown Water Tower Campus.

Dr. George Dunea, President and CEO of the Hektoen Institute, chaired the morning session. Dr. Dunea showed some 30 slides by well-known artists who had painted medical or healthcare related subjects, such as Sir Luke Fildes' "The Doctor," Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," as well as paintings by Goya, Sargent, Durer, Van Gogh, and several others.

Art History Professor Dr. Lyle Massey of Northwestern University presented the first paper. In her talk, "Pregnancy as Pathology," she discussed eighteenth-century obstetrical atlases. In particular, Dr. Massey drew upon richly illustrated examples of manuscripts and the role that male physicians and female midwives played in anatomical research.

Her presentation was followed by "Reflections of a Mad Artist," delivered by Ann Starr, an affiliated scholar and visual artist from the Department of Art History at Kenyon College. Ms. Starr considered artistic creativity and its influence in the recovery process from mental illness. As both a professional artist and mental-health patient, Ms. Starr's semi-autobiographical presentation was somewhat critical of how some psychiatrists and mental health professionals relate to their patients.

Continuing in the field of psychology, Dr. Prudence Gourguechon from Chicago's Institute of Psychoanalysis examined the artwork and psyche of Austrian painter Egon Schiele in a paper titled "The Dead Mother Series of Egon Schiele: Psychoanalytic Use of an Artist's Image. " Dr. Gourguechon also discussed how Schiele's images influenced her approach to patient therapy.

Professor Laurinda Dixon from the Department of Fine Arts at Syracuse University offered a reading of the art of Northern Renaissance painter Hieronymous Bosch. She focused on Bosch's painting "Stone Operation," an intriguing depiction of Renaissance morals and medicine.

Dr. Sally Metzler, Director of the D'Arcy Museum of Art, Loyola University Chicago, chaired the afternoon session. She opened the afternoon with a brief discussion of several key artistic images depicting medicine, including Fra Angelico's Renaissance painting of doctors St. Cosmas and Damian performing a graft operation. She also showed Thomas Eakins startlingly realistic works of operations, "The Gross Clinic" and "The Agnew Clinic."

Her presentation was followed by Dr. F. Lynn Meshberger's talk, "Michelangelo and the Brain: an Interpretation of the Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy." Dr. Meshberger, a gynecologist in private practice from Indiana, offered an intriguing theory that compared the cloud-like structure behind Adam in the Sistine Ceiling to that of the human brain.

Next, Doctoral Candidate from the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, Ms. Touba Ghadessi, presented an analysis of the reception of physical deviance primarily in eighteenth century Italian art and culture in her talk, "Portraying Physical Deviance: Art Monsters and Anatomy." She showed images of famous deviants, including dwarfs and hirsute court figures.

A discussion of Italian art continued in the presentation by Dr. Sheila Barker, a Clowes Fellow at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Dr. Barker discussed the role of the religious orders, in particular the Jesuits and the artistic treatment of their work in her talk "From Miracles to Medicine: New Representations of Cure in Baroque Rome."

The symposium concluded with independent scholar Ms. Jill Bugajski's talk "Body Beyond Canvas: Action, Endurance and the Physical Art Challenge." Ms. Bugajski engaged the participants with her discussion of the fascinating genre of performance art, and in particular the psychological relationship between the artist and audience. She demonstrated the important role of the audience in the act of the performance, in particular when the artist tests his or her body beyond its perceived normative physical and psychological limits.