The four doctors.

Abstract

W hen the Johns Hopkins Hospital opened in May 1889, its four pillars-William H. Welch in pathology, William S. Halsted in surgery, William Osler in medicine, and Howard A. Kelly in gynecology-were already in place. They had been recruited earlier with the promise of faculty positions in the medical school that was soon to be opened. However, inadequate endowment funds threatened to delay the opening. A women’s fund committee led by Miss Mary Elizabeth Garrett raised the necessary funds and presented them to the new school on Christmas Eve 1892 with the proviso that women should be admitted to the medical school on the same basis as men. In 1893, Hopkins’ first class included three women and 15 men. In 1905, Miss Garrett commissioned John Singer Sargent, the best known portrait painter of the day in both Europe and America, to paint a portrait of Hopkins’ four leaders. The four physicians traveled to London. The painting proved to be frustrating for the usually facile Sargent. He spent a great deal of time grouping and regrouping the four men, required numerous individual portrait sittings, disagreed about the color of Osler’s robes, and totally repainted Osler’s face after the work had been finished. Finally, to complete the pictare, he added a large venetian globe (even though he had to remove part of his studio docw to get it in) and an El Greco painting in the background. The prolonged effort, during which Sargent frequently became discouraged, resulted in a painting that Professor William Gerdts has considered the acme of formal and official medical portraiture in American art. A legend says that Halsted and Sargent disagreed about the use of certain colors in the painting and that Sargent thus deliberately painted Halsted’s face with pigments that would fade with time. The absence of change in the painting has proved this legend false. The portrait was unveiled by Miss Garrett on January 18, 1907. Today it hangs in the William H. Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins Medical School next to the Sargent portrait of Miss Garrett that was commissioned by the trustees of Johns Hopkins University and Hospital. John Singer Sargent was born in Florence, Italy, in 1856 during his American parents’ nomadic travels through Europe. By the age of 18, he was already studying in Paris. Eleven years later, he moved to England, where he would live for most of the rest of his life. However, when offered English knighthood, he refused to give up his American citizenship. He traveled frequently to America to satisfy the great demand for his paintings. Although Sargent was best known for portraiture, his landscapes and spontaneous watercolors, both mainly associated with trips to the continent, and his Boston Public Library murals represent other important facets of his legacy. Sargent died at the age of 69 on April 15, 1925, in his London studio.