The Gross Clinic, Surgical Amphitheater, Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The Gross Clinic, Surgical Amphitheater, Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The Surgical Amphitheater of the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was a room like this that hosted both the Gross Clinic and the Agnew Clinic took 19th century Philadelphia. This room is on the third floor of the oldest continually operating hospital in the United States.
Dr. Gross was a physician at Jefferson, I would find it hard to believe he was painted in a competing hospital’s surgical amphitheater.
Mr. Sargent is largely correct. Dr. Gross was at Jefferson and the original scene of the Gross Clinic is in an amphitheater formerly at Jefferson. However, Dr. Gross certainly would not have been a stranger at the Pennsylvania Hospital, as he was a medical genius of his day. For example, in an 1869 advertisement for the Jefferson Medical College, the following was written:
“The lectures [at Jefferson] are so arranged to permit the student to attend the clinics of the Pennsylvania Hospital, and the Philadelphia Hospital…”
However, the point is more that this extant surgical amphitheater is an example of the type of room in which the Gross Clinic and the Agnew Clinic would have been conducted.