On June 3, 1984, Margaret Supplee Smith, Diana E. Long, and Eugenia Kaledin delivered papers at the Sixth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. My paper followed as a formal commentary.

Smith, an art historian, and Long, a historian of medicine, originally conceived the session as inter-disciplinary and had therefore invited Kaledin, a literary historian, and myself, also an art historian, to participate. Long, Smith, and I focused upon Thomas Eakins's The Agnew Clinic, 1889 (Figure 2). Our goal was to peel away its explicit and implicit layered meanings—what it meant to the artist, to the doctors involved, and to what was then seen as the world of modern medicine—in order to reveal the values and ideology operating among the elite of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Smith's strategy entailed an analysis of the painting in the context of the social history of late nineteenth-century medicine and attitudes about art. Long placed the dramatis personae—Dr. Agnew, the attending surgeons, Nurse Clymer, and the anonymous female patient undergoing the mastectomy-within the context of the modernization of surgery. My own task in the commentary was to view The Agnew Clinic from the angle of the history of art — a s that history influenced Eakins — and to compare his opus with the group portrait The Four Doctors, 1906 (Figure 23) painted by his younger contemporary John S. Sargent. Eugenia Kaledin contributed a literary analysis of the novels and literary efforts of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the man who formally received the painting at the “Agnew Day” ceremony from the three classes of students on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania trustees.