The Agnew Clinic

THE EARLY years of the 1870s saw radical changes in the fabric of national life. With economic and psychological recovery from the Civil War hardly resolved, Americans were faced with tides of immigrants, employment in factories...

As institutions, psychoanalysis and art history have much in common. Indeed, it might be argued that they share a point of origin – Vienna around the turn of the last century – and that they work within a common body of material...

François Sallé’s The Anatomy Class (1888, see fig. 1.1) focuses on a muscular ‘labouring’ body and provides important material for examining ideas of normality...

~Upon arriving in Philadelphia in the spring of 1884, Muybridge began his work by photographing animals in an outdoor studio he set up at Philadelphia’s Zoological Garden. Ultimately, his outdoor studio for human subjects in the enclosure of the university’s Veterinary Department would...

~The Agnew Clinic (fig. 1) today hangs high on a wall in the foyer of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. The painting cannot be taken in all at once; approximately six feet high by eleven feet long, it is exceptionally large. What first attracts the eye is the white-clad figure standing in isolation in the foreground, left...

A 1746 graduate of Yale College, Ezra Stiles (1727–1795) returned as the school’s seventh president in 1778. Stiles, a respected Newport minister, was one of the town’s most erudite citizens. Fluent in several ancient languages, he read Greek and Roman history, philosophy, and the Cabala. In the sciences, Stiles proved no less inquisitive. He corresponded with Benjamin Franklin and conducted some of the earliest electrical experiments in America...

When Charles Willson Peale painted Exhumation of the Mastodon, he intended it as a backdrop for the bones of the beast, installed in his encyclopedic museum. Both the painting and the bones were impressive and tangible evidence of the artist’s accomplishments and legacy. Eakins created several works with that same impulse, but the three that stand out most prominently in his career are The Gross Clinic, painted expressly for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia; Swimming (1885), …