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This painting captured my attention. The painting is called a vergers dream: Saint Cosmas and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of leg.This is an oil painting. The painter had used a variety of colors to make this painting vibrant. The green drapery looks elegant in the background. Since this is all a dream, the verger is sleeping peacefully. He is draped with white and red sheets. The two saints dressed in colorful robes stand on the side of the bed. There are golden circles at the back of their heads. One saint has a limb in his hand while the other saint is holding a circular yellow box, as if the tools needed for the transplant. There is an angel behind the saints who is praying. There are two more angels in the room, they are kneeling on the other side of the bed. All the angels have colorful wings. One angel is holding a candle in his hand and the other angel has the Verger’s limb that is being replaced from the knee. Presence of candle in the angel’s hand suggests that it is night time and also the title of the painting says that it is a dream. Since this a miracle, we do not see any blood in the scene. The saint who is performing the miracle is attaching a dark colored limb to the vergers body, probably from someone who is already dead. verger’s leg must be diseased.

 

This image caught my attention immediately because I can appreciate a birth scene, not a typical one. In this modern world, you don’t see often a home birth. This image was published in 1800, in this time there was no medical equipment and medical care for this occasion. In this image you can see three people focus in the birth of a child. I can tell the man in the left is the doctor or the experienced midwife, and the old lady in the right is the mom who is very worried about her daughter and the grandchild on the way. The third person in this picture I believe is the sister who is more calmed and is helping the midwife. This image describes the essence of human life. Giving life is the most beautiful thing a human being has done. In the history of man, animal or any species known to man giving life is the most important accomplishment.

Fear is instilled in us as children that if you eat too much candies and chocolate your teeth will turn rotten and fall out or the dentist will have to pull them out, and when you have a tooth ache or a loose tooth it is a common practice to pull those teeth out more quickly by tying one end of a string around your tooth and the other to a doorknob and then slamming the door shut to yank the tooth out. Either way of having your teeth removed are unpleasant. The image here shows an “operator” extracting the tooth of a young man, the reason probably being a toothache or rotten tooth as aforementioned. The procedure is being made a spectacle for 8 other men who are probably trying to learn the technique. This image stood out to me mainly because of the comical aspect, the operate has a smirk on his face while the man sitting on the right has a distinguishably perplexed look on his face as he is trying to figure out what is really happening. The patient himself looks far from comfortable and is looking directly up at the operator as if he wants him to stop. He is even trying to wave his hand in discomfort but the operator is pinning his arm down to the table. Compared to the images we have looked at in class this one is certainly on the brighter side; because having a tooth pulled is something most people have experienced it’s more relatable than an image of the plague of the coming of Jesus Christ.

 

The Wellcome image I chose was from 1784.  It is an engraving by Thomas Rowlandson and it depicts a young woman being bled by a doctor.  There are three figures in the image. Two are female and one is male. The central figure is female and is interacting with both other figured. The make figure is to the central figured right and is holding the central figures arm. The figure on the left is also female and is embracing the central figure and holding a bowl in the cereal figured lap that is collecting blood.

The make figure is presumably the doctor.  He wears a blue coat, yellow vest and white pants and shirt. The central figure wears a pink dress and the left figure wears a yellow dress. There are only nine distinct colors in the image. The colors are black, yellow, pink, white, blue, gray, beige brown and white. All the figures gave the same shade of hair and skin. The yellow of the dress and the best ate identical. Although the image portrays a woman being bled, there is no red. The blood is represented by black lines falling neatly from the central figures arm into the bowl.  The entire scene is very calm and civilized, there is no mess. It portrays blood letting as a simple , relatively painless procedure, reflecting the attitude of the time.

The image I chose from Wellcome Images does not have an artist’s name but it was “taken from the Apocalypsis S. Johannis cum glossis et Vita S. Johannis; Ars Moriendi (circa 1420 to 1430), which were gynaecological texts that included information about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth”.  This image is an ink and watercolor illustration that shows a caesarean section in medieval times. The woman on the table is still cut open, bleeding and dead. The nurse is holding the baby that was just born in a blanket. The surgeon, although doesn’t look like a typical surgeon is holding a knife, a knife that you would cut a piece of meat with. This picture is not easy to look at, especially for a woman. Most women, who underwent a C-section in medieval times, did not make it due to the severe bleeding that occurred. Sterile techniques were not in place, allowing infection to play a big role in death. This image relates to the images we saw in class with the woman and child at the doctor’s office. Similar to those images, we can conclude that back then doctor offices did not look sterile, proper or how we would expect them to look. Physicians looked like ordinary people.  As you can see in this drawing, the room has no surgical supplies besides the butcher knife. There is also no means of sedation or pain medication. The amount of pain, infections and blood loss experienced by the mother was more than enough to guarantee death after the birth of a child.

The image I chose is an oil painting of a child birthing scene by a French painter, which depicts a very detailed picture of a woman in the 1800 giving birth.

In this painting, the woman giving birth has a very pale, distressed facial expression and it seems as though she has lost a lot of hair on the crown of her head which is a symptom of pregnancy. She is also undressed from the stomach down but is still wearing socks with a blue band to prevent the sock from falling. The man behind her might be her husband holding her up. He seems more excited and happy rather then sharing the distress the woman is in because of the position of his hand on the side. There are two other woman that seem to be helping the woman with the child birth. One of them is obviously much older than anyone in the entire painting kneeling down, calmly and professionally wrapping the pregnant woman’s leg while holding the body of the infant. The other woman is standing behind the whole scene pouring water on a pan for the infant to lie on to bathe him/her. From the furniture and utensils in the painting, the family doesn’t seem to be very wealthy and the room seems fairly empty with not much furniture or objects.

What is so striking about this painting to me is that the painter chose to show the full frontal view of what giving birth was like at that time including the blood and half of the infant’s body sticking out of the woman’s vaginal region. The entire vaginal area is very much blatantly displayed with blood dripping from the cloth to the floor. Compared to the images seen in class, this painting is sending a more positive vibe. Child birth may seem very painful and bloody but it’s actually a very happy event to give life.

 

The image I picked from the Wellcome Database is called “A surgeon applying medicine to a wound in the shoulder of a man in pain.” by Gerrit Lundens. It captured my attention because of the face of the man from the painting. There is three people on the painting. One doctor, one patient, and one look to be the assistant who is preparing the medicines. The patient is sitting on the table while the doctor is putting medicine on his wound on his shoulder. The patient is wearing an overall and a pair of work boots, therefore I think he might got his shoulder hurt at work. However, His face tells us that the medicine is giving him more pain, which is a normal phenomenon because the medicine is killing the bacteria, meanwhile, the skin gets more sensitive to the stimulus from the environment when it’s wounded. It reminds me of a image we saw in class, which was about the woman is having a headache and the doctor is checking on her. In both images, I can find the origin of the distress by examining the details of the image carefully; Also, both of their face expressions give us a generally idea of what is happening there.