article · Issue No. 10, October 1956 · p. 26 p. 27

Medicine... in the Hands of the Artists

الطب... بين ايدي الفنانين

They are poles apart: the scientist, who looks at the world with coolness and analyzes matters with deliberation... and the emotional artist, who lives in the world of feeling and warmth... Yet the two opposites meet in devotion to truth and in striving to serve humanity; and on this basis they proceed toward a single goal — to preserve knowledge for the ages that follow. The scientist records it between the covers of books and treatises, and the artist stores it up in a distinguished painting on which he depicts, with precision and fidelity, the life he has known.

More wonderful still, this pictured record has opened wide horizons before physicians in the study of diseases and their history; and the paintings of famous artists displayed on these pages have become valuable sources on which physicians rely in the study of certain diseases.

It is worth noting that modern medicine detects the ailment by means of X-rays or the scientific investigations conducted in the laboratory, whereas information about disease used to be recorded on a scrap of paper or in the memory of history, to be handed down by one generation from another.

And so the researchers remained in doubt as to the truth of what was related in those accounts and traditions... yet they could not deny the realities of the diseases pictured by the brushes of famous artists, who painted, simply and faithfully, what they saw around them. In the paintings of "Rembrandt" and "Holbein," for example, the physician can trace the history of the disease "syphilis" — or melancholia — and of the plague and the various fevers.

These paintings are artistic treasures — and yet they are worth more than that in the eyes of the scientists: they are the problems of medicine on exhibition...

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