Within the ever-expanding literature produced at the intersection of art and the health humanities, The Medicine of Art offers a thoughtful reframing of familiar people and places in which disease is not a disjuncture, but a point of connection, community, and intense artistic inquiry. Looking beyond the clinic, Elizabeth Lee argues that fin-de-siècle artists confronted with serious illness found a kind of relief in creative practice that period medicine could not offer. Her book skillfully interlaces extensive archival work with diverse perspectives from art historians, scholars of cultural and medical history, and theorists including Arthur Frank, Susan Sontag, Katherine Ott, Sander Gilman, and Jackson Lears.

Lee’s approach is rooted in biography. Each chapter revolves around the life and work of a well-known figure: Thomas Eakins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Charles Lang Freer. Disease altered the trajectory of each man’s life, transforming not only bodies but social relationships, financial situations, day-to-day routines, and—Lee argues—creative praxis. Lee positions her work not within the “older, more myopic version of art historical research in which the artist’s biography provided the primary analytical lens,” but one in which “biographical detail can provide a starting point which expands well beyond the realm of the personal” (27). True to this promise, Lee leverages the specificity of individual narratives—captured in letters, diaries, memoirs, and medical reports—to help her reader develop a kind of period eye for Gilded Age illness that has transferable utility beyond the five case studies in this book and highlights the importance of attending to the historically contingent nature of health and disease.

Lee opens with the topic of exhaustion, deftly moving from individual artists’ experiences of fatigue to period beliefs about the body’s finite capacity for energy storage, to how modern life electrically charged, or drained, that reservoir. Art historians have long connected neurasthenia—the nervous exhaustion diagnosed primarily in wealthy, white US American urbanites—to period portraits of languid women or the curative qualities attributed to landscape painting. Lee leverages their work to illustrate how physiological experience became entangled in ideas of labor, class, gender, place, technology, and even nationality. While touching upon paintings by James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Dewing, Dwight Tryon, and George Inness, Lee selects Eakins for closer analysis. In drawing a new connection between the familiar dissection of Eakins’s medicalized bodies and the classicized youths of his Arcadias, Lee introduces her second major premise: that illness and health are, as Nietzsche writes, “not essentially different” (16). Battling disease and striving for fitness emerge from the same fundamental root and remain entwined and inextricable. Thus, Lee argues that while scholars have read Eakins’s rural Arcadians as disconnected from his usual investment in picturing contemporary life, a countryside retreat from the stresses of modernity was as embedded in period medical discourse as was gross anatomy. The chapter ends with Lee’s plan to locate an equivalent “therapeutic world view” (22), borrowing Jackson Lears’s term, within the lived experience of other diseases.

Chapter two begins on the well-trodden ground around Stevenson’s prolonged consumptive illness. Scholars have made various post-mortem diagnoses of the poet, emphasizing how he leveraged the association between tuberculosis and creative genius. Lee, however, reverses the expected line of questioning. In addition to scrutinizing portraits of the poet for insights into their subject, Lee asks how works by Sargent, Saint-Gaudens, and Thayer reflect their creators’ relationships to consumption. Sargent, she argues, brings a shared “disease perspective” (47) to his portrait of his close friend that is colored by his own sister’s recurrent illness and their family’s similar pursuit of cures across Europe. Conversely, Saint-Gaudens—who only met Stevenson once—produces iterative portraits of the poet alone in his sickroom, “ill but industrious” (64), the cigarette in the writer’s hand emblematic of a bohemian disregard for health in the name of artistic perseverance. The resonance between these portrayals and the sculptor’s own turbulent relationship to productivity and debility as his health declined becomes clear in chapter four. The section ends with Thayer’s Stevenson Memorial, in which the painter conflates the death of the poet with the loss of his wife to the same disease. Ultimately, the chapter presents illness not as a source of isolation, but as a locus of connection, empathy, and inspiration.

The following chapter expands upon Thayer’s relationship to consumption. After his wife’s death, the painter moved to Dublin, New Hampshire to avoid urban contagion and strengthen his children against their perceived hereditary vulnerability to the disease. Lee’s devotion to archival work shines as she combines a discussion of the period’s climate cures, simple living, and transcendentalist retreat from modernity with rich details of Thayer’s self-administered sanitorium lifestyle. This approach lends credibility to both Lee’s analysis of the artist’s paintings of ruddy-cheeked, uncorseted figures striding through fields and her broader claim that the pursuit of health is an under-examined element within the formation of artist colonies. A brief but rich detour into the life and work of George de Forest Brush highlights how imaginaries of indigeneity—if not Indigenous people themselves—manifested in the artistic and pharmaceutical constructions of nature as medicine.

The fourth chapter moves to Cornish, New Hampshire, where Saint-Gaudens relocated after a diagnosis of rectal cancer. Investigating another artists’ colony allows Lee to contrast Dublin’s “pantheistic reverence for nature” (128) as an antidote to modernity with the “modern New England version of classical antiquity” (128) that infused life at Cornish, dovetailing with an emerging national interest in exercise and physical fitness. Although the end of Saint-Gaudens’ life is often reduced to “a narrative of loss and decline” (122), Lee returns to the archive to fill out those seven years between diagnosis and death. She does not shy away from the painful, debilitating, and stigmatizing aspects of both cancer and its varied treatments. However, she also chronicles Saint-Gaudens’s newfound passion for athletics and fitness, from swimming and skating to building a toboggan chute for his children. These details combine to produce a nuanced account of living with disease. Lee concludes by applying this interpretive framework to Saint-Gaudens’s Phillips Brooks Memorial, a subject that resonated with the artist’s intermittently overwhelming preoccupation with death, a commission whose progress served as “a barometer of the artist’s health” (140), and an object from which the sculptor refused to part during his lifetime.

The final chapter is the most speculative and theoretical, likely due to Freer’s unwillingness—or inability—to write about his disease. Here, Lee argues that collecting served a therapeutic function for the industrialist as he navigated the physical, mental, and societal difficulties of living with neurasthenia and syphilis. Lee elucidates the curative potential of individual pieces from Freer’s collection, from the optical rest offered by Whistler’s landscapes to the projection of Emersonian pantheism onto Buddhist philosophy. Through collecting, she argues, Freer transformed his home into “an immersive site of psychological relief” (169), facilitating his transition from health-seeking travel to a practice of curative looking and remembering. Lee further proposes that art offered a safe form of both tactility and sexuality for a person rendered socially untouchable and connects Freer to the larger nineteenth-century practice of self-fashioning through material objects. Her invocation of disability theorist Lennard Davis, however, hits a slightly discordant note. Davis’s argument, based in Lacan’s mirror stage, is that encountering the fragmented (disabled) body fractures the “abled” viewer’s faith in their own coherence. As disability scholars have emphasized, post-structuralist dives into disability’s metaphorical functions often have little resonance with disabled peoples’ experiences. In a chapter devoted to the latter, hewing to the “disease perspective” prioritized throughout the book might have been a cleaner and more compelling route to Lee’s productive conclusion that Freer constructed a new self through collecting.

On similar grounds, we might trouble Lee’s uncritical adoption of the organic disease/functional disorder binary, a modern medical standard that differentiates between illnesses with clinically measurable biomarkers and those without. Entrenched in what Foucault dubs “the medical gaze,” this distinction reveals more about the capacities of scientific instrumentation than about illnesses themselves, which move between these categories even within the span of Lee’s book. Similarly, her attempt to separate physical and mental illness falters in circumstances that produce psychological symptoms. However, Lee laudably steps over her own barriers as needed, articulating her book as functioning in “the gap between these two discursive worlds” (28), the imposed order of medical science and the lived disorder of individual experience. Moreover, Lee’s use of these imperfect distinctions seems to stem from an understandable need to carve out an achievable scope for an already-ambitious book and to differentiate her study from the extensive literature on neurasthenia in nineteenth-century art, and on the relationship between creativity and mental illness more broadly.

Lee identifies one other intentional limitation to her project; her subjects are “predominantly white middle- or upper-middle class men in the Northeast—who by no means capture the range of artists working in the late nineteenth-century” (26). She continues, “Since their work was embedded in patterns of white privilege and power, it comes as little surprise that their art [best] illuminates hegemonic ideas from a history of medicine centered on the white male body” (26). Thus, Lee leaves us with fascinating lines of further inquiry for those working on gender, race, class, and disability in the Gilded Age, all of whom will benefit greatly from the groundwork laid by her extensive research.