| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.3

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.3 | The History Cooperative

BOOK REVIEWS

Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. By Amy Werbel. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. xii, 194 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $55.)

Amy Werbel's new book on Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) seeks to understand Philadelphia's foremost realist painter and the controversies surrounding him "with a medical gaze" (30)—a perspective ostensibly truer and more faithful to the artist than that found in much recent scholarly writing. The book makes some valuable contributions, notably in clarifying the nature of Eakins's photographs and his relation to medical anatomy, but it ultimately seems marred by a combative approach reflecting the current divisive state of scholarship on the artist. Werbel espouses a hard-line empiricist view that "historical facts" (x) understood "objectively" (41) trump what she calls "the cottage industry of speculative historians" today (4). "In recent years," says Werbel (without naming names), "[Eakins] has been cast by scholars as a victim of a paranoid Oedipal complex, sexual harasser, pervert, philanderer, abusive uncle, misogynist, repressed homosexual, and slandered innocent" (x). Lamenting that "We live in a time of fallen heroes" (ix), Werbel contends that "our historical subjects deserve the same common courtesies we hope for the living—the privilege of self-definition to the extent feasible, an effort to understand context and point of view, a presumption of innocence, and finally, not to be neutered, outed, demonized, or similarly categorized to suit the intellectual fashions of our own times" (161).

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