The most famous paintings of doctors and medicine run from Rembrandt’s dissection to the doctor who failed to save Van Gogh. Twelve canvases about healing and its limits, including a quack drilling a skull and a teenager’s hospital scene that predicted Picasso.
Learn art the fun way
1 | The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, Rembrandt (1632)
Amsterdam’s surgeons commissioned a group portrait of their annual public dissection. The corpse is Aris Kindt, hanged for robbery that same morning.
Rembrandt was 26, new in town, and this canvas made his name. The rest of the climb and the fall I cover that in Rembrandt.
2 | The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins (1875)
Dr Samuel Gross operates on a leg in a Philadelphia amphitheater, scalpel in a bloodied hand, while the patient’s mother hides her face.
The art jury of the 1876 world’s fair refused it as too graphic; it hung in an Army hospital display instead. The painter who refused to look away More of it in Thomas Eakins.
3 | The Doctor, Luke Fildes (1891)
A physician watches over a sick child at dawn in a laborer’s cottage, chin on hand, out of medicines and out of options. Fildes had lost his own son at Christmas 1877.
The painting became the ideal image of the profession: the American Medical Association printed it on a stamp, and it still hangs at Tate.
4 | The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, Hieronymus Bosch (about 1494)
A quack in a funnel hat drills a peasant’s skull to remove the stone of folly, a fraud actually performed at fairs on the gullible.
Bosch makes the joke visible: what comes out of the head is a flower, and the surgeon’s funnel hat marks him as the real madman.
5 | The Doctor’s Visit, Jan Steen (about 1665)
A young woman swoons, a doctor takes her pulse with theatrical gravity, and everyone in the room knows the diagnosis: lovesickness, possibly pregnancy.
Steen painted this comedy nearly 20 times, always with a smirking clue in the background. The comedian of Dutch painting The full account is in Jan Steen.
6 | Portrait of Dr Gachet, Vincent van Gogh (1890)
The homeopathic doctor charged with watching over Van Gogh in Auvers, painted with what Vincent called the heartbroken expression of our time.
Six weeks later the painter was dead, and in 1990 the portrait sold for 82.5 million dollars, then a world record. Those last weeks are retraced hour by hour in The Last Day of Vincent van Gogh.
7 | Science and Charity, Pablo Picasso (1897)
A doctor takes a dying woman’s pulse while a nun holds her child: an academic tearjerker painted by Picasso at 15, under his father’s direction.
The doctor is his father’s portrait, and the painting won a national honorable mention. What the prodigy did next I go into it in Picasso.
8 | Self Portrait with Dr Arrieta, Francisco Goya (1820)
Goya, 74 and grey, sags in the arms of the doctor who holds a glass of medicine to his lips. The inscription thanks Arrieta for saving his life in the illness of 1819.
A painting as a thank you note: the man who painted kings paid his doctor in immortality. The survivor I cover that in Francisco Goya.
9 | The Sick Girl, Christian Krohg (1881)
A tubercular girl faces the viewer head on, white on white, a rose losing petals in her lap. No doctor in sight, because there was nothing a doctor could do.
Krohg, who had lost his sister to tuberculosis, painted the disease that defined a century of Nordic art. Munch saw it and answered with his own sick child.
10 | The Cow Pock, James Gillray (1802)
A satirical print of Jenner’s new smallpox vaccine: patients sprout tiny cows from their arms and faces as the doctor calmly inoculates the next victim.
Anti vaccine panic is older than the syringe. Jenner’s method still won, and smallpox is the only human disease ever eradicated.
11 | The Village Doctor, David Teniers the Younger (about 1645)
A rural practitioner examines a flask of urine by the window while his shelves overflow with jars, herbs and a stuffed reptile.
Uroscopy, diagnosing by looking at urine, was standard practice for centuries. The painting is a portrait of medicine before medicine.
Teniers and his followers painted the quack doctor as a stock comic figure, examining a flask of urine he cannot read. Uroscopy was genuine medical practice, which is what made the parody land.
12 | The Agnew Clinic, Thomas Eakins (1889)
Fourteen years after The Gross Clinic, surgery has changed: white coats instead of black frock coats, antiseptic protocol, a nurse in the room.
Two paintings by the same artist bracket the birth of modern surgery. Medical schools still use them side by side as a before and after.
The Rijksmuseum holds the Dutch medical pictures, and the Met covers the rest of the genre.
The Gross Clinic earns its reputation through the blood the jury refused to hang, but Rembrandt's Tulp still wins on composition alone, every eye in the painting doing real work. A crowd that photographs well is not the same thing as a picture that rewards a second look.
Fildes' Doctor gets reproduced on stamps and treated as the sentimental filler of this list, and that undersells it. A doctor with nothing left to give is a harder subject than any surgery, because there is no scalpel to hide behind.
Picasso's teenage tearjerker and Goya's thank you note to his own doctor sit at opposite ends of honesty. One borrows a father's face for a school prize, the other is an old man admitting a stranger kept him alive. Only one of them still moves anybody.
Steen played sickness as a punchline, restaging the same lovesick swoon nearly 20 times for laughs. Krohg painted the same subject straight, a dying girl who stares back at the viewer with nothing left to hide behind. Krohg had lost his own sister to tuberculosis before he painted The Sick Girl, and it shows in the difference between a joke and a diagnosis.
What people want to know about these doctors
Which one would I put first? The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, with The Gross Clinic as the American answer.
Was the stone of madness a real operation? The scam was real: fair surgeons pretended to cut a stone of folly from the skull for money.
Who was Dr Gachet? Van Gogh’s doctor in his final weeks, an art lover who was painted twice and sold for a world record a century later.
Why was The Gross Clinic rejected? The blood. The 1876 art jury refused it, and a medical display took it instead.
Where is The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp today? The Mauritshuis for Tulp, Philadelphia for both Eakins clinics, Tate for The Doctor, the Prado for Goya and Bosch.
The postscript is the best part: when Philadelphia’s museums bought The Gross Clinic jointly in 2007 to keep it in the city, the price was 68 million dollars, for a canvas once judged unfit to hang with art.
This subject is one thread in a wider theme. See how it fits into Work and Everyday Life in Painting.