The Gross Clinic

The Gross Clinic or The Clinic of Dr. Gross is an 1875 painting by American artist Thomas Eakins. It is oil on canvas and measures by . The painting depicts Dr. Samuel D. Gross, a seventy-year-old professor dressed in a black frock coat, lecturing a group of Jefferson Medical College students. Included among the group is a self-portrait of Eakins, who is seen at the right-hand side of the painting, next to the tunnel railing, with a white cuffed sleeve sketching or writing. Seen over Dr. Gross's right shoulder is the clinic clerk, Dr. Franklin West, taking notes on the operation. Eakins's signature is painted on the front of the surgical table. Description 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 (in previous years surgery was associated primarily with amputation, which caused severe medical complications, sometimes killing the person), and because it shows what a surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century.