Published: Nov. 05, 2011
Words: 116,957 (approximate)
Language: English
ISBN: 9781465760869

Short description

A painter can imitate life through his art, but he can also imitate death. Thomas Eakins creates a masterpiece as anatomy labs proliferate, whores and winos vanish, antisepsis appears in hospitals, and the world visits Philadelphia for its 1876 exposition. His painting, The Gross Clinic, evokes a literary vision of beauty, murder, and redemption, blending impasto pigments, medicine, and passion.

Extended description

NORTHERN LIBERTIES

A painter can imitate life through his art, but he can also imitate death.

In 1876, Thomas Eakins talks his way into the operating theatre of the famous surgeon, Samuel Gross. As Eakins sketches, the patient’s mother, Abigail Doverlund, has a near seizure at the brutality of the operation. An anesthesiologist keeps her boy in a coma, true, but the filth and lack of sterility at the scene fill her with dread. (Read more) NORTHERN LIBERTIES

A painter can imitate life through his art, but he can also imitate death.

In 1876, Thomas Eakins talks his way into the operating theatre of the famous surgeon, Samuel Gross. As Eakins sketches, the patient’s mother, Abigail Doverlund, has a near seizure at the brutality of the operation. An anesthesiologist keeps her boy in a coma, true, but the filth and lack of sterility at the scene fill her with dread.

A homicide detective, George Callahan, investigating a series of mysterious disappearances, watches the surgery, too. Soon he finds evidence leading him to an anatomy lab tucked in the basement of Jefferson Medical College.

Abigail, widowed owner of a failing newspaper, struggles to keep her son alive. Her paper’s circulation grows, however, with both its coverage of the disappearances and her science editor’s muckraking articles on infections and the use--or lack of use--of new antiseptic techniques. Meanwhile Eakins, when not working feverishly to create his masterpiece, utilizes his med school connections to supply his art classes with anatomic sketching materials. Gross himself has a never-ending need for cadavers for his medical students.

Abigail and George meet but have trouble acknowledging their mutual attraction, for each retains psychic wounds from the Great War. As their love grows, as Abigail’s reportage leads her from hospital to hospital and teaches her about microbial theory, the dark side of Eakins and Gross’s genius becomes clear. George, searching Northern Liberties, a downtrodden quarter of Philadelphia, unearths a macabre crime, but not until he comes close to losing his beloved Abigail.

When scientific and artistic experts converge for the 1876 Centennial Exposition, multiple threads of love, art, medicine, and murder weave a cloth of beauty, passion, death, and redemption, a tapestry evoked by that horribly wonderful painting itself, The Gross Clinic.
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Tags

history, civil war, painting, philadelphia, cadaver, oil painting, art class, thomas eakins, samuel gross, the gross clinic, joseph lister, antisepsis, louis pasteur, germ theory, hare and burke murders, anatomy class

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Reviews

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Review by: Audrey Driscoll on June 30, 2012 :
Northern Liberties by Glenn Vanstrum is a rich concoction of art, medicine and murder set in 1870s Philadelphia. Its unifying element is artist Thomas Eakins’s painting The Gross Clinic. Vanstrum takes the reader into the operating theater and Eakins’s studio, twisting several thematic threads into an interesting and gripping read. He demonstrates an insider’s knowledge of anatomy and surgery, as well as the process of creating an oil painting.

A number of historical themes give this book heft and depth. The primary one is the terrible residue of the American Civil War, which informs the choices of the principal characters, real and fictitious. Another is the transition from primitive to modern surgery that resulted from the work of Joseph Lister. From a present-day perspective it’s hard to believe that the adoption of antiseptic procedures was strongly resisted by the medical establishment, but Vanstrum’s book makes that vividly clear. The grisly business of obtaining corpses for scientific dissection adds a macabre touch to the story.

The dialogue is tense and realistic, the pacing brisk but not dizzying. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. That it provoked me to learn more about Thomas Eakins and Samuel Gross is a bonus.
(reviewed long after purchase)

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