Medicine, anaesthesia, cycling, hope, peace, and healing. Please suggest more paintings, sculpture, mixed media or any piece that tickles your fancy here or Tweet us @theanaesroom!
Hope. This bronze plaquette representing Hope was probably made by the Master of the Cardinal Virtues in South Germany, in about 1580-1600. Hope is depicted as a female reclining to the right and looking upward to the left towards God the Father who is seen in the clouds. V&A museum. 
‘Health = Environment. Environment = Health.’ Poster designed for, and exhibited at, the 4th Poster Biennale in Lahti, Finland. Lino-cut print, coloured by hand. Signed and dated ’80’. V&A museum 
Sickness and Health. Webster exhibited this painting alongside a quotation from Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Three Cottage Girls’: ‘The cheerfulness of innocence survives to mitigate distress’. He starkly contrasts the girls dancing to organ music with the sick girl and her anxious family. A critic thought it ‘a simple subject, treated with infinite grace and pathos’. V&A Museum. 
Hand coloured glass slide depicting Mr Punch being examined by a doctor, number six of a set of 12.
The following text accompanies the slide during a magic lantern show:
Punch: Oh dear, I been thrown off my donkey. What an ass he is. I believe I’m killed. Doctor, dear doctor, feel my pulse; try to save me for dear old Judy’s sake. What, nothing the matter with me? Don’t gammon me, I know I must be killed, I feel like it.
Lino-cut print poster depicting two blue figures holding hands, with the title (‘Peace Is Just Understanding People – Helping Them‘) lettered between them in red. All against a white ground. V&A Museum. 
Mercy and Truth are met together, Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other. William Blake, V&A Museum. 
A Malabar Doctor and his wife. One of sixteen paintings of castes and occupations. The backgrounds are all plain with no clouds. The set appears to include drawings by two hands; one group with plain blue backgrounds, the other dull yellow; this one of a Malabar doctor and his wife; the man, in white, with a bag under his arm, the woman in a red tie-and-dye sari; against a blue background. 
Dance to the medicine bag of the brave. “This is a custom well worth recording, for the beautiful moral which is contained in it. In this plate is represented a party of Sac warriors who have returned victorious from battle, with scalps they have taken from their enemies, but having lost one of their party, they appear and dance in front of his wigwam, fifteen days in succession, about an hour on each day, when the widow hangs his medicine-bag on a green bush which she erects before her door, under which she sits and cries, whilst the warriors dance and brandish the scalps they have taken, and at the same time recount the deeds of bravery of their deceased comrade in arms, whilst they are throwing presents to the widow to heal her grief and afford her the means of a living.” George Catlin based this image on sketches he made at a Sac and Fox village in 1835. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 56, 1841; reprint 1973)
National Library of Medicine
Wellcome Collection, CC-BY
Wellcome Collection, CC-BY
From: An Artist in the University Medical Center plate 236, page 168
©May H. Lesser
At Vienna, miner Paul Diebel demonstrates to the Austrian Society for Psychical Research the ‘fakirism’ whereby he feels no pain even when knives and daggers are thrown at him. 1928
A surgical operation in the Murghab Valley, the patient under chloroform. Illustration of an a surgical procedure performed by the British surgeon, C.W. Owen. A young woman had fallen into a fire and burnt her face. Dr. Owen is shown operating on the eye of the unconscious woman, while a group of people in native dress watches. 1885. Chloroform was once a widely used anesthetic. Its vapor depresses the central nervous system of a patient, allowing a doctor to perform painful procedures.
Charles Thomas Jackson (1805-1880), American physician, geologist and chemist experimenting on himself with ether in 1841. It is said that after experimenting on the anaesthetic properties of chloroform and nitrous oxide gas his experiments on himself with ether led him to conclude that it would be a suitable anaesthetic for surgical operations. In 1846 Jackson’s advice was sought by the dentist Dr William Morton, an ex-student of Jackson. The nature of Morton’s request and Jackson’s response were the subject of bitter dispute between them and their supporters when Morton claimed credit for the introduction of ether.
Illustration of how anesthesia may be produced by means of pressure. Representation of carving from 2500 BC.
Medieval inquisitors examining a woman to see if she was guilty of witchcraft. According to canon law, signs of insensibility indicated she was being protected from the sufferings of torture by the power of the devil. However., in 1585, Etienne Taboureau, counsel to the King of France, wrote that this procedure was almost useless as all the gaolers of the accused were aquainted with a ??stupefying recipe??(anaesthetic) which they did not fail to communicate to the prisoners. Though the existence of plants and drugs with anaesthetic properties had been known and used by torturers and sorcerers alike for millennia, it was not until the 19th century that anaesthesia in medical practice became established.
It is thought that Shennong lived from 2737 to 2697 BC, and legends say Shennong looked like a man but had a transparent stomach so he could see the effects of the plants he ingested. He is said to have eaten hundreds of plants while using his body to research their medicinal properties. The Huainanzi , a Chinese collection of debates from c. 139 BC, states that people were weak, sickly, starving, and diseased prior to the coming of Shennong.
A skeleton, representing death, enters through a window at left, while a doctor points a syringe at him at right. The patient is seated next to the doctor, holding up a spoon to protect him from the advance of Death
The Anaesthetic Room 