From Leonardo to Hepworth: the art of surgery

A doctor with wild grey hair and mutton chops holds a scalpel in his bloodied hand. He has paused for a moment, allowing one of his students to take his place and complete the incision. It’s a remarkably clean cut; the young man with the clamp has barely dirtied his shirt cuffs. Even so, the patient’s mother, if that’s who she is, weeps in the corner. She can see nothing but frock coats and a segment of open flesh.

The 19th-century Philadelphia-based artist Thomas Eakins did not paint surgery as it was, exactly, but he did capture something of its veiled sterility. There may be no gowns or masks in his earlier medical pictures, but the wool coats and shirts worn by the doctors only do so much to soften the atmosphere of the operating theatre. The overriding impression is one of detachment. The doctors may be just an inch from their patients, the scribes not a lot further away, but emotionally, they exist on a different plane entirely.

‘Plus ça change!’ some will sigh at the pitiful lack of bedside manner on display in many such pictures. But isn’t that why we need medical art? To be reminded that scientific progress isn’t everything; that medicine is fundamentally about one human (or humanoid robot, as it may now be) helping another? In ‘The Gross Clinic’ (1875), less unedifying than its title suggests, Eakins emphasises the relationship between teacher-surgeon Samuel Gross and his male pupils over the relationship between the group of them and the dehumanised patient on the table. Gross would need to stand back and look at the painting to appreciate how quickly a human can be mistaken for a body.

The difficulty for many early surgeons was that they were more used to performing operations on corpses than on living people.