The Medical World of The Agnew Clinic : A World We Have Lost?

Describing the artistic sources of and the tensions in The Agnew Clinic , Margaret Supplee Smith suggested that the doctor was freer than the artist to break the bonds of the past and challenge those of the present. This paper will look further into the doctor's role by following the fate of three medical principles I have found associated with David Hayes Agnew by contemporary biographers: the physician as a moral actor, surgery as a progressive social responsibility, and gender as a primary (dis)qualification for medicine. In all three areas Agnew was identified as a man who had successfully navigated the shoals from the Victorian world of his youth to the modern world of medicine, science, and gender roles that was making itself felt in Philadelphia in 1889. Agnew, in this view, stood as both a warning against the new culture and a model of how to neutralize its dangers.