Self censorship is an internalized supremacy that replaces desire, evolution, and experimentation with rank and risk averse assimilation. Over a decade after painting his Civil War Reconstruction era portrait of Dr Gross
@jeffersonuniv in 1875, Thomas Eakins is commissioned by UPenn to paint this antiseptic America in Dr Agnew's panoptic surgery theatre in 1889.
Anesthesia is the effect American privilege has on an artist and a nation whose amnesia of its political violence being unleashed on Indigenous people of the Dakotas offers context for this procedural painting. Aside from the erasure of blood, the recoiling mother at Gross Clinic's bedside is here replaced by an unconscious Lady Liberty. Whereas nimble, gesticulating hands wrought alluring flesh in Gross, Agnew's restraint simply titillates the viewer with a pinched nipple at the patient's heart.
Nearly half a century after photography began appearing in surgery rooms, this bloodless memorial painting commissioned by an ivy league institution illustrates the impact prestige has on the human imagination. Although Agnew was famous for his surgery on President Garfield after he was shot, his effortless oversight of a mastectomy procedure is a distant emotion from the histrionic gore grounding Gross Clinic in the formation of American mythology.
The national institute of health faces not only removal from government depending on the election, it must reconcile one of the largest fraudulent scientific medical studies funded in US history. Where images are evidence, what truth can data offer in a clinical setting if democracy is dead?
The damage prestige supremacy does to ingenuity, poisons public imagination while it sterilizes intellectual invention. This fundamental value is in direct conflict with capitalist philosophy and is the central legacy American democracy attempted to overcome last century. Absorbing war immigrants like Einstein is the most obvious global impact, winning WWII. However, with America in its totalitarian stage, where in Earth is human intelligence safe? Another way to ask is: where on Earth is democracy thriving for human life? Or is this dark age a global paradigm?
