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 8 feet by 6.5 feet. Many art historians consider The Gross Clinic to be one of the best American paintings ever made.
Dr. Samuel D. Gross, a seventy-year-old professor dressed in a black frock coat, lectures 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 into the painting, on the front of the surgical table. 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, and because it shows what the surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century. The painting is based on a surgery witnessed by Eakins, in which Gross treated a young man for osteomyelitis of the femur. Gross is pictured here performing a conservative operation as opposed to an amputation. Here, surgeons crowd around the anesthetized patient in their frock coats. This is just prior to the adoption of a hygienic surgical environment. The