FAMOUS FEMALE DOCTORS

doctors

A qualified dentist or veterinary surgeon
(doctor) a licensed medical practitioner; “I felt so bad I went to see my doctor”
A qualified practitioner of medicine; a physician
A person who gives advice or makes improvements
Doctor of the Church: (Roman Catholic Church) a title conferred on 33 saints who distinguished themselves through the orthodoxy of their theological teaching; “the Doctors of the Church greatly influenced Christian thought down to the late Middle Ages”
(doctor) sophisticate: alter and make impure, as with the intention to deceive; “Sophisticate rose water with geraniol”

famous

(famously) excellently: extremely well; “he did splendidly in the exam”; “we got along famously”
celebrated: widely known and esteemed; “a famous actor”; “a celebrated musician”; “a famed scientist”; “an illustrious judge”; “a notable historian”; “a renowned painter”
(famously) in a manner or to an extent that is well known; “in his famously anecdotal style”
Known about by many people

female

being the sex (of plant or animal) that produces fertilizable gametes (ova) from which offspring develop; “a female heir”; “female holly trees bear the berries”
Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) that can be fertilized by male gametes
an animal that produces gametes (ova) that can be fertilized by male gametes (spermatozoa)
characteristic of or peculiar to a woman; “female sensitiveness”; “female suffrage”
Relating to or characteristic of women or female animals
(of a plant or flower) Having a pistil but no stamens

Birthwort or Dutchman's Pipe, Aristolochia cymbifera, Hortus Botanicus, Leiden, The Netherlands

In 1817-1820 the German botanist and explorer Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794-1868) travelled widely in Brazil. In his enormous collection of specimens was this Aristolochia cymbifera of the Birthwort or Dutchman’s Pipe family (called Jarrinha in Brazil). At Munich he and another today famous botanist – Joseph Gerhard Zuccarini (1797-1848) – who was a gifted draughtsman as well, put together an illustrated volume of South American plants. In it they described this Birthwort.
The word ‘Aristolochia’ is thought to derive from the Greek for ‘best’ and ‘delivery’ (as in the ‘delivery of a child’). The liquid extracted from its roots was used in medicine to expel the placenta after childbirth.
Zuccarini had a wide European network of like-minded naturalists and explorers. Another of these was the famous Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866), expert on Japan before that country was opened to the West in the mid-nineteenth century (1852-1854 by Admiral Perry). Von Siebold had lived the life of a doctor, naturalist and spy in Japan between 1823 and 1830, when he was expelled. In that time he had taken a common-law wife, Kusumoto Taki "Sonagi" (1807-1865). Their daughter Kusumoto Ine (1827-1903) became Japan’s first female doctor practising western medicine. She specialised in gynaecology, but I haven’t been able to discover whether she used our Aristolochia in her practice. Zuccarini helped Von Siebold in publishing the latter’s Flora of Japan, although a complete edition had to wait until Von Siebold’s sons completed it in the 1870s.
To connect again to Leiden, where this plant is in the wonderful green houses of the Hortus Botanicus: Von Siebold and his collection moved here upon his adventurous return to Europe. His house is now an exciting little museum asking to be visited.
But I had to return to my meetings, leaving another visit for a later day. It had been a well-worth half an hour, though, in the Green House as the Hortus itself was awash with rain.

The Scream of Nadya Suleman

I derived the subject of this piece from the controversial 2009 birth of a set of octuplets to a single mother named Nadya Suleman, who was already the single parent of six other children–including a set of twins–between the ages of 2-7. All of her children, including the octuplets, were the results of IVF treatments she received from the same doctor at the same fertility clinic. If that wasn’t enough, one of her children was diagnosed with autism while one of her other children was diagnosed with ADHD.

What further fuled the controversy was the fact that at the same time she gave birth to all of her children, Suleman had been on disability for the last 10 years due to a a back injury she sustained from the last job she held and she had been accepting student grants for her college study while she still lived with her parents. (She gave birth to her children while she was a college student.)

In the interviews she gave on on NBC’s Today show as well as videos she has made for RadarOnline.com after the birth of her octuplets, she came across as someone who was in total denial about her situation. She kept on saying that she will resume her college studies the following fall despite the fact that she would be the mother of 14 children under the age of 8–including an autistic child, a child with ADHD, and eight infants. She also kept on saying that raising all those young children under her roof would be no problem at all, even though the videos she did for RadarOnline.com showed a household under chaos with rowdy children–complete with her kids running around, hitting each other, and even hitting their mother.

When I did the painting, I imagined a scenario where Nadya Suleman finally faced up to the reality of her situation and she let out a loud scream. I took the main figure from Edvard Munch’s famous Scream series of paintings and ink drawings, changed the gender from male to female, and plopped her into a scene of domestic chaos.