Co-presented by NSU Art Museum and NSU Health.
Between the acceptance of germ theory in the 1880s and the antibiotic revolution of the twentieth century, works of art enjoyed a unique moment in which they functioned in medicinal terms for both artists and viewers. This talk considers, for example, how the painter Abbott Thayer addressed his fear of disease by turning his children into the subject of art following the death of his wife from tuberculosis. Works of art also defined the public perception of Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the nineteenth century’s most famous writers and tuberculous patients, who was pictured by John Singer Sargent and Augustus Saint-Gaudens through a romantic lens that treated his illness as a mark of talent. These examples suggest how Gilded Age artists translated disease into another language–a visual language with therapeutic powers.
Saturday, October 24, 2026
10 – 11 am
At NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
Free for Members | $16 for Non-Members
Free for NSU Students, Faculty & Staff
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Elizabeth Lee is Professor of Art History at Dickinson College, where she teaches courses in modern, contemporary, and American art. Her research on American art and the history of the body, health, and medicine has appeared in numerous publications, including the journals American Art, Archives of American Art Journal, and The Brooklyn Rail, as well as the edited volumes Routledge Companion to Art and Disability (Routledge, 2022) and Modernism, Art, Therapy (Yale, 2024). Her book, The Medicine of Art: Disease and the Aesthetic Object in Gilded Age America (Bloomsbury, 2022), expands the repertoire of questions used to think about American art by demonstrating how well-known works are embedded in narratives of illness and health. She received funding for this research from the Huntington Library in Pasadena, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Dr. Lee recently completed an article on Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of neurological patients for his famous study, Animal Locomotion, and is currently working on a book about the uses of photography to advance nineteenth-century medicine.
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Major support for NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale is provided by the David and Francie Horvitz Family Foundation Endowment, the City of Fort Lauderdale, Jerry Taylor and Nancy Bryant Foundation, Wayne and Lucretia Weiner, Broward County Cultural Division, the Cultural Council, and the Broward County Board of County Commissioners, Community Foundation of Broward, Lillian S. Wells Foundation, the Wege Foundation, Beaux Arts of Fort Lauderdale, The Hudson Family Foundation, Delia Moog, Charles and Laura Palmer, Dr. Barry and Judy Silverman, and Friends of NSU Art Museum. NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
