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In 1901, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens proclaimed in a letter
to Will Low, “Health—is the thing!” Though recently diagnosed
with intestinal cancer, Saint-Gaudens was revitalized by
recreational sports, having realized midcareer “there is
something else in life besides the four walls of an ill-ventilated
studio.” The Medicine of Art puts such moments center stage in
order to consider the role of health and illness in the way art was
produced and consumed. Not merely beautiful or entertaining
objects, works by Gilded-Age artists such as John Singer Sargent,
Abbott Thayer, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens are shown to function as
balm for the ill, providing relief from physical suffering and
pain. Art did so by blunting the edges of contagious disease
through a process of visual translation. In painting, for instance,
hacking coughs, bloody sputum, and bodily enervation were recast as
signs of spiritual elevation and refinement for the tuberculous,
who were shown with a pale, chalky pallor that signalled rarefied
beauty rather than an alarming indication of death. Works of art
thus redirected the experience of illness in an era prior to the
life-saving discoveries that would soon become hallmarks of modern
medical science to offer an alternate therapy. The first study to
address the place of organic disease—cancer, tuberculosis,
syphilis—in the life and work of Gilded-Age artists, this book
looks at how well-known works of art were marked by disease and
argues that art itself functioned in medicinal terms for artists
and viewers in the late 19th century.
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