Thomas Eakins The Gross Clinic

Thomas Eakins The Gross Clinic

I find this piece of artwork so interesting. I love that in art you have the literal and the figurative meanings behind everything. In this painting the  forehead and hand are lit up, meaning its 2 part surgery. They are combing cerebral, scientific, with manual, hands. The thing that makes me cringe is that in this time they were using no drugs, he felt everything they were doing. It used to be a form of butchery, but now we are looking at the professionalization of surgery. In the professionalization of surgery they combined the stand off physician and the manual doctor. This pointed out the idea of professionalism in Human Society. The President of the Pennsylvania academy in Philadelphia lost this job. He believed that if he could feel what the human body felt like in his arms he could paint them better. So he got naked and carried around his wealthy students. So he got fired. This called attention to recent development in recent American History. Alice Walton wanted to make a museum in Arkansas of the best American Art. Hired art historian to go around and buy all the art around America. People are getting angry that she is taking all the artwork and relocating them to Arkansas. Philadelphia rose up and raised enough money to counter her offer to keep it in Philadelphia. Charles Dawson Shanley wrote a poem around this time called The Walker of the Snow, and one of the prose read: “But they spoke not as they raised me;/For they knew that in the night/ I had seen the Shadow-Hunter/ And had withered in his blight”. Although this doesn’t have a lot of direct correlation to the artwork, it does in my eyes. This man in the poem saw things the others had not seen. Felt the way others would not as he lie in the snow. This artwork shows the surgery in a classroom for people to come and see. For that that was originally not seen by the public, to be brought into the light.