JMH Online First, published on January 24, 2013 as 10.1136/medhum-2012-010274 Original article Med Humanities: first published as 10.1136/medhum-2012-010274 on 24 January 2013. Downloaded from Identifying the patient in George W Lambert’s Chesham Street Keren Rosa Hammerschlag Correspondence to ABSTRACT Paris) and infant patients (eg, in Luke Fildes’ The Dr Keren Rosa Hammerschlag, This paper takes as its focus one of the Edwardian Doctor, 1891, Tate, London). Centre for the Humanities and ’ fi Health, King’s College period s most dramatic and little-understood paintings of In the rst section of this paper, I argue that the London, 5th Floor, East Wing, a medical examination: George Washington Lambert’s subject of a medical examination offered Lambert Strand Campus, London Chesham Street (1910). The painting shows an upper- homoerotic possibilities by bringing into close, WC2R 2LS, UK; class male patient lifting his shirt to reveal a muscular intimate contact two men of similar class standing.
[email protected] torso for examination by the doctor in the scene and the I posit that the painting illustrates the deployment Received 17 October 2012 viewers outside it. The subject of a medical examination, of the visual and aural senses in early twentieth- Accepted 30 November 2012 I argue, legitimised the scrutiny of exposed male flesh century medical diagnostics, but also explores the and offered an opportunity for sensual pleasure between sensual pleasures involved in being a patient. In the men. paper’s second section, I locate in the figure of By way of a comparison with other portraits of the the patient signifiers of the complex and sometimes artist from around the same period, I interpret Chesham conflicted identity of Lambert as an Australian Street as a patient self-portrait, which reveals the artist’s expatriate artist living and working in London in dual personalities of bohemian artist and Australian the early twentieth century.