Medicine and Art

Medicine and Art by Alan E H Emery, Marcia L H Emery. Royal Society of Medicine Press in association with the Royal College of Physicians, £40, pp 112. ISBN 1 85315 501 2. Rating: ★★

Alan Emery is a distinguished British neurologist and an amateur painter; his wife, Marcia, is a librarian and trained psychologist. This book reflects their shared love of art and history, and contains more than 50 colour illustrations of works that portray the changing role of medicine in society. Each illustration is accompanied, on the opposite page, by a short article giving a succinct summary both of the career of the artist and the medical event illustrated. Fifteen of these articles have previously appeared in Clinical Medicine, the journal of the Royal College of Physicians.

The historical range is from a statue of Imhotep (physician to Pharaoh Djoser) from 2600 BCE to a Lancet cover from 2001 of Louise Riley's tapestry The Patient and Researcher. The book includes both well known and obscure artists and a wide variety of clinical activities. Traditional Indian Ayuverdic, Chinese, and Tibetan Buddhist medical systems are praised for being holistic, whereas patients in the West are “disappointed by modern scientifically-based medicine.”

I learnt that Goya's acute neurological illness in 1792 was probably Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada syndrome; that the process of metastasis was first recognised by Joseph Récamier; that in Science and Charity, painted in 1897, the 16 year old Picasso used his painter-father as the model for the doctor; and that Elizabeth Blackwell funded the completion of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and School of Medicine only on condition that it admitted women medical students. At the end of book is a list of medical conditions depicted in paintings.

The one black and white illustration is excellent. As with all but the most expensive books on art, there is the notorious problem that the colour reproductions are not of high quality. This might be because the publishers were given inadequate colour transparencies, or it might be down to poor printing or a failure to show the authors the final colour proofs. The last three art books that I read that had satisfactory colour pictures were printed abroad—two in Italy and one in China—and one of those books had to be withdrawn after publication and reprinted to a satisfactory quality.

I hope that the plates in the next edition of Medicine and Art will fill the whole or almost the whole of the pages rather than leave large white margins. It would be helpful to have an index of artists, to put the medium and the measurements in the legends, and to place the names of copyright holders in an appendix.

Figure.

MUSEÉ DE L'ASSISTANCE PUBLIQUE, PARIS/BAL

Detail from Le Tubage by Georges Chicotot (1904)