While a senior at Forest Park High in Baltimore, I received an ecstatic phone call from someone I was dating:  “ I have been accepted at Jefferson Medical School,” he bellowed, gulping for air as he spoke.  “The heart lung machine was developed there.  Jeff is known for training doctors to be healers.  It’s alum are so dedicated that in the 1870’s they bought Thomas Eakin’s masterpiece, The Gross Clinic.  I saw it on the wall.  I even touched it.”

It would take years, including one failed marriage (not to the future physician quoted above).  But, in time I would learn about the priorities and commitments described in this call.  Early in our courtship my husband, who spent his entire medical career at Jefferson, introduced me to The Gross Clinic. An extraordinary depiction of surgical drama and clinical teaching, the painting highlights the stature famed Jefferson surgeon, Samuel D. Gross.

No longer touchable (thankfully) it was in its own Gallery in Alumni Hall, under 24 hour watch and care.  The gallery was brimming with art students, visitors, and members of the Jefferson community.  My future husband explained that when doctors, nurses, and staff felt concerned about their patients and overwhelmed by their responsibilities they would be renewed by visiting this special gallery:  “The Gross Clinic is the touchstone to the soul of our university.

Twenty seven years after this first visit, on November 10, 2006 Thomas Jefferson University announced that it was selling the Eakins masterpiece for a vast amount of money that some art historians said was a steal.  Jefferson alumni, faculty, and students were not consulted about this decision.

Shock and disbelief hit and grew on campus. One of my husband’s students in a Professionalism class asked:  “What if I gave my wife a ring that had been in my family for generations and she decided to sell it without discussing the decision with me?  What would this say about her respect for me and the trust between us?”

The Gross Clinic would soon be on its way to spend its time in a gallery planned in Bentonville Arkansas by the Walmart heir.  A loophole in the sale offered museum and community leaders forty-five days to raise money to keep the masterpiece in Philadelphia.  Some expressed outrage that vast funds would be raised for art when so many vulnerable families suffer daily.  Amidst this backdrop, thousands, including many members of the Jefferson family, joined the successful effort to keep Eakin’s work in its home city.

On January 21, 2007 the Philadelphia Art Museum hosted a glowing party to thank the thousands who contributed to this effort.  As soon as I entered the museum, two thoughts suddenly came to me:

A year earlier federal judge Ed Becker, who if life were fair, would have become a Supreme Court member, died after a valiant battle with cancer.  At Ed’s memorial service his son told an exquisite story.  His father entered the University of Pennsylvania determined to find out the meaning of life by becoming a philosophy major.  There in a class he met a beautiful girl with red hair, Flora Lyman. Ed changed his major, now knowing that love and giving was the meaning of life. In contrast, Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, as a young man loved and lost a beautiful girl with red hair.  Through Charlie Brown he longed for her for the rest of his life.

When I saw the Gross Clinic in its new home I understood the reasons for these two flashes of thought. The painting was exhibited beautifully, proudly, majestically.  It was wonderful that Philadelphia had united to save a masterpiece woven into the tapestry of our phenomenal city.  Still the painting looked lost, even homesick, in its new surroundings.

And then I understood: Keeping The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia was an act of love, of true giving.  But with giving there also can be loss; it was I who was homesick. Despite my joy that Philadelphia would not loose The Gross Clinic, the Jefferson family had lost its palpable and beloved symbol and touchstone, one cherished and protected for 129 years. It will never come home again.      

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