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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

attitudes, doctors, American art, perception of doctors

College

Fine Arts and Communications

Department

Art

Abstract

The halls of the Pennsylvania Hospital, the first hospital in the United States, are decorated with portraits of physicians. In fact, many of the portraits were done by now-famous American Artists like Benjamin West, Thomas Sully, and Thomas Eakins. A tour of the hospital would also include the first surgical amphitheatre, where Dr. Phillip Syng Physick performed operations by the light from a skylight beginning in 1804. Visitors to this hospital, like me, are instilled with a sense of the grand history of medicine, and its advances in the last two hundred years. Unfortunately, what the hospital’s art collection doesn’t communicate to visitors is the legacy modern medicine is currently leaving behind. There are no paintings immortalizing the father of chemotherapy, or the discoverer of the polio vaccine. What some might call the golden age of medicine seems to be chronicled only by the fact that humans are living long enough to remember when such monumental discoveries were made.

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