Kurt Gilliland talks about the Importance of Remembering the Past

What's in a name?  How do physicians really communicate?  How does the history of medicine compare to its future?

Meredith Browne, an artist and faculty member at John Abbott College in Montreal, Quebec, who has portrayed many famous physicians writes...

“While most of us are probably familiar with the fact that some parts of our bodies, such as the Fallopian tubes or the Islets of Langerhans on the pancreas, are named for the doctors and scientists who first described them, it is not widely recognized just how many eponyms appear in the study of human anatomy.  Like explorers who claimed geographical features in the names of their kings, queens, countries or selves, clinicians and anatomists have left their names on many of our physical features.”

Some of Meredith Brown’s work is featured in Anatomists and Eponyms: Spirit of Anatomy Past.  Each of her paintings represents symbolic, narrative, or historical aspects of a body part named for its “discoverer.” Her project addresses a number of questions including what it means that, whether we know it or not, we all carry these honorific references to now long-dead men with us all the time. It is also an experiment in the use of the visual arts as a means of uncovering and interrogating ways of understanding the body and its meanings which come to us from previous iterations of scientific and medical practice.

The small scale of the paintings (like the cover of a book) was chosen to create a resonance with the familiar and intimate act of reading, encouraging the viewer to think about what it means to read the body through the history of medicine and anatomical study.  Her paintings required both text-based research into the lives and histories of the men who named these parts of our bodies, and visual research looking for images of historical figures and depictions of anatomical features. She identifies her practice as being a kind of research creation—rather than merely illustrating the famous man and the part of the body he named, each painting represents symbolic, narrative, or historical aspects of a body part named for its “discoverer.”

Eponyms are not just a thing of the past new structures and processes are being named to this day! See what Ole Daniel Enerson has collected on the topic.

Kurt Gilliland