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Human Dignity and Bioethics

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Alice Neel (1900-1984), T.B. Harlem, 1940, American. Oil<br />

on Canvas. 76.2 x 76.2 cm.<br />

Courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the<br />

Arts, Washington, D.C.; gift of Wallace <strong>and</strong> Wilhelmina<br />

Holladay. © Estate of Alice Neel.<br />

While most of the art world turned to abstraction towards the<br />

middle of the twentieth century, Philadelphia-born Alice Neel (1900-1984)<br />

courageously chose to remain a figure painter. Occasionally she painted the rich<br />

<strong>and</strong> famous–artists, playwrights, scientists, even a papal nuncio–but mostly her<br />

subjects were the unnoticed, the overlooked, the difficult. They were her neighbors<br />

in Spanish Harlem: stay-at-home mothers, pregnant mothers, door-to-door<br />

salesmen, restaurant workers, tradesmen. Nor did she shy away from those most<br />

would rather not confront–a dying, querulous old woman, a middle-aged man in<br />

the late stages of cancer, a young man ravaged by tuberculosis. But whether her<br />

subjects are young, old, famous, unknown, nude or clothed, Neel’s gift was to<br />

reveal their common denominator: an ineffable, undefinable, invisible human<br />

quality we call dignity.<br />

T.B. Harlem, completed in 1940, is one of the most well-known of Neel’s paintings.<br />

Gaunt <strong>and</strong> resigned, the subject could have been a young man dying on a battlefield<br />

of World War II pinned with a medal of honor. Instead he is a young man in a<br />

Harlem hospital fighting an all too prevalent disease to the death. His badge of<br />

honor covers the wound of thoracoplasty, or surgically induced lung collapse, then<br />

a radical treatment of last resort for tuberculosis. Neel also accurately portrays the<br />

side-effects of both the treatment <strong>and</strong> the disease: owing to the loss of several ribs<br />

on the affected side, compensatory thoracic <strong>and</strong> cervical curvatures of the spine<br />

pull it into the opposite directions of an S-curve. Atrophied muscles of the arms<br />

<strong>and</strong> h<strong>and</strong>s <strong>and</strong> the lax abdominal muscles suggest that the battle has been a long<br />

one; the atrophy is the result of disuse, the protuberant abdomen indicative of a<br />

long-st<strong>and</strong>ing lack of proper nutrition. But Neel’s painting is not a medical treatise<br />

on tuberculosis. It is rather an eloquent essay on the inherent dignity of human<br />

beings that exists quite independently of exterior circumstances.<br />

M. Therese Southgate, MD

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