Who+Owns+Art?+Looking+at+Thomas+Eakins'+The+Gross+Clinic

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//**The following entry is taken from Wikipedia:
 * [[image:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/EakinsTheGrossClinic.jpg/300px-EakinsTheGrossClinic.jpg width="300" height="384" link="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:EakinsTheGrossClinic.jpg"]] ||
 * //**The Gross Clinic**// ||
 * **Thomas Eakins**, 1875 ||
 * oil on canvas ||
 * 8' × 6'6" cm ||
 * Thomas Jefferson University ||

The Gross Clinic**// is an 1875 painting by [|Thomas Eakins]. It is [|oil] on [|canvas] and measures 8' by 6'6". Dr. [|Samuel D. Gross], a seventy-year-old professor dressed in a black frock coat, lectures a group of [|Jefferson Medical College] students. Included among the group is a self-portrait of Eakins, who is seated to the right of the tunnel railing, sketching or writing. Seen over Dr. Gross' right shoulder is the clinic clerk, Dr. Franklin West, taking notes on the operation. Eakins's signature is painted into the painting, on the front of the surgical table. 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", which depicts a cleaner, brighter, surgical theater. In comparing the two, we see the advancement in our understanding of the prevention of infection. Interestingly, the gender of the patient is not established by anything concrete in the painting itself. This fact makes "The Gross Clinic" somewhat unique, as it presents the spectator with a body that is naked and exposed, and yet is not entirely legible as male or female. Another intriguing element of this painting is the lone woman in the painting, seen in the middle ground of the painting, cringing in distress. She can be read as a female relative of the patient, acting as a chaperone. Her dramatic figure functions as a strong contrast to the calm, professional demeanor of the men who surround the patient. This bloody and very blunt depiction of surgery was shocking at the time it was first exhibited, and remains so for many viewers of the painting today.

Controversy surrounds this painting, particularly recently. The painting has been at Jefferson in Philadelphia for a long while, but intead the board voted to sell the painting for $68 million dollars to a museum in Arkansas. In November 2006, Philadelphians who were up in arms about the sale made efforts to keep the painting in Philadelphia, including $30 millions dollars in fundraising in a matter of weeks and proposed changes to historical preservation laws for the city. Eventually, Wachovia agreed to loan the remainder of what was needed to keep the painting in the city, and so thus it has remained here.