![]() Nothing documents the American medical attitude of the time better than Thomas Eakins’s portrait of the revered Dr. He fully supported America’s skepticism, if not disbelief, in the theory put forth by Joseph Lister (1827–1912) in 1867, then working at the University of Edinburgh and leveraging Louis Pasteur’s (1822–1895) earlier observations and discoveries concerning the role of bacteria in fermentation and human disease. Gross (1805–1884), author of the most popular surgical textbook of his time, System of Surgery in 1859, was not convinced that germs caused infections or made a difference in surgical outcomes. American physicians were still waiting for a definitive answer, by their standards, as to whether bacteria caused disease, a controversy that probably cost President James Garfield his life in 1881. The germ theory of disease was known and widely accepted in Europe at this point in time, but was not yet an important influence on medical practice in the United States. This was the state of general medical knowledge in the middle of the 19 th century – just about the time that Thomas Eakins painted The Gross Clinic, in 1875. The identification of disease sites and associated pathology became more specific as diagnostic tools were discovered or invented (such as the stethoscope) or improved (exemplified by the microscope). This was followed in the 18 th century with a superficial understanding of the ways in which those structures (organs) were related to illness. Direct anatomical observations during the 15 th and 16 th centuries, combined with the availability of movable type and paper, provided the first widespread knowledge of man’s internal physical nature. ![]() These incremental steps were often advantageous, but at times, they proved to be disastrous misadventures. The history of medicine has largely been the result of increasingly successful efforts made to find those interventions that appeared to improve health by succeeding generations of doctors and scientists. (Republished with permission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Alumni Association to Jefferson Medical College in 1878 and purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007 with the generous support of more than 3600 donors). The Gross Clinic was introduced to the public in 1876 at the United States Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, PA, USA.
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