Last week, the Fleming Museum installed the work of art, Study for Controlled Medicine by William C. Palmer, at the Dana Medical Library. You will find it hanging in the back study area near the stacks, under the skylight.

Larner College of Medicine student and Fleming student board member, Liam John, had the idea for a program where artworks would be installed on a rotating basis at the Dana Medical Library to “teach visual analysis to future physicians.” Works of art would be selected for this location at the library and would hang for up to a year at a time. Provided by the Fleming Museum, the art would be curated by College of Medicine faculty and students and would have the financial support of the Dean’s Strategic Fund.

Study for Controlled Medicine was selected as the first work of art in connection with this program.

 

About this piece:

William C. Palmer (American, 1906-1987)

Study for Controlled Medicine, 1935

Ink wash and pencil on paper

Gift of Henry Schnakenberg  1945.2.9

Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont

William C. Palmer created this study for a mural for Queens General Hospital (now Queens Hospital Center) through the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. He intended it to show the progress from “ignorance, fear, and superstition” to the preventative care depicted by the young child receiving a vaccine, surrounded by supportive doctors and nurses as caregivers.

In hospitals in Queens, NY in 2020, doctors described “apocalyptic” scenes of being overwhelmed by severe shortages in equipment, beds, and staff as the borough became a hot spot of COVID-19 patients. As public hospitals have closed or become privatized in the past two decades, there were only three public hospitals left in Queens that served people, mainly Black and brown, mostly immigrant residents, who had little affordable access to medical care. “People spent days in the Elmhurst waiting room and they were terrified,” a nurse reported. “People shouldn’t have to go through that.”

This study was selected by Thomas G. Stetson, who is one of the artists currently being shown at the Fleming Museum, in the exhibition Call and Response: Personal Reflections on the Fleming Collection. Artists from the Howard Center Arts Collective worked with Fleming Museum staff to choose objects from the Museum collections, spend time with them, and create their own artwork in response.