Portal:Philadelphia/Selected picture/April 2007

credit: Thomas Eakins

The Gross Clinic is an 1875 painting by Thomas Eakins. It is oil on canvas and measures 8' by 6'6". The painting depicts Dr. Samuel D. Gross lecturing a group of Jefferson Medical College students. Admired for its uncompromising realism, The Gross Clinic has an important place documenting the history of medicine - both because it honors the emergence of surgery as a healing profession, and because it shows us what the surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century.