La Clinique Gross

Eakins painted this in Philadelphia in 1875, aiming it squarely at the Centennial Exhibition the next year, the fair meant to show the world what the United States had become. He chose to celebrate American medicine. At the centre, in a black frock coat, is Dr. Samuel Gross, a famous Philadelphia surgeon, pausing mid-operation with a bloodied scalpel to lecture the tiered students around him as an assistant cuts into a patient's thigh. Eakins spared nothing, including the bright blood on Gross's fingers. The Centennial's art jury found it too gruesome and refused it, so it was shown instead in a mock army field hospital across the grounds. Look for the seated woman recoiling with a hand over her face, thought to be the patient's mother. It hangs now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.