Medical Statistics Made Clear

and "the simplest and one of the most important innovations", the stethoscope, first described in 1816. Ernest Board's picture of Laennec Listening to the Chest of a Patient shows the physician using a simple wooden tube to auscultate the chest of a man showing probable phthisis and a detail is also used on the dust cover of the book. A number of plates are devoted to hospitals and teaching. Reproductions of the famous picture showing Jean-Martin Charcot conducting a case presentation at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, by Pierre-Andre Brouillet (1960s) must hang in many neurological units (we had one at Claremont Street Hospital) and the student audience includes figures such as Babinski and Gilles de la Tourette. A similar picture by American artist Irving R. Wiles shows an unnamed doctor teaching on a sick child at the New York Polyclinic School of Medicine (1891). The audience includes three women, which provokes a lively account of the advent of women into medicine in the late 19th century. Hospital wards of the time are depicted vividly by Vincent van Gogh (The Hospital at Arles, 1889), a ward in the London Hospital painted by Belfast born John Lavery, 1915 and Ancoats Hospital Outpatients' Hall by LS Lowry (1952) who's characteristic little figures vividly convey the crowded bustle of the old-fashioned outpatient hall. The subject of insanity is the stimulus for several paintings, from the individual Healing of a Lunatic Boy (1986), by Stephen Conroy to a vivid depiction of The Madhouse (1987), painted by the Russian artist Sergei Chepik, following a number of visits to a psychiatric institution where, as 'artist in residence', he made sketches of the inmates and produced a picture which is part representational and part allegorical.