Hannah Darvin Receives Research Support Grant

Hannah Darvin, PhD candidate in the Department of Art History & Art Conservation at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, was awarded a Research Support Grant in 2023. Below Hannah details the research activities she was able to undertake as a result of the award:

In the spring of 2023, I was fortunate to be awarded a Research Support Grant from Paul Mellon Centre (PMC). This award supported travel to the United Kingdom and the United States to undertake on-site archival research for my dissertation, “Sentimentalizing Medicine: Luke Fildes’s The Doctor (1891) and the Idealized Image of the Physician Patient Relationship”. Under the supervision of Dr Allison Morehead, my interdisciplinary doctoral thesis focuses on recontextualising and rethinking Luke Fildes’s The Doctor and examining how it has been ideologically used to construct contemporary ideas about the doctor-patient relationship and medical encounters on both sides of the Atlantic.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the rise of modern medicine brought a rapidly expanding corps of medical professionals, new medical institutions and often invasive medical interventions, provoking a range of ambivalent and often visceral feelings. Upon its exhibition in 1891, Fildes’s painting of The Doctor was immediately appropriated by the medical establishment and used to construct an idealised vision of modern medicine and the doctor-patient relationship. Although The Doctor became a potent symbol of patient care in the medical field, Fildes’s sentimental treatment has evoked long-lasting disdain in art historical circles. In the early twentieth century critiques about sentimentality and Victorian art permeated modernist criticism, with The Doctor playing a central role as a symbol of unfashionable and undesirable Victorian art. As a result of this view, perpetuated by modernist critics, art historians have long been reluctant to critically engage with this painting as well as with other sentimental nineteenth-century Victorian pictures.

With the generous support of the Research Support Grant, I was able to travel to London and Liverpool to explore the life and work of Luke Fildes. Whilst in London, I visited various archives which hold material relating to the artist and his oeuvre. My primary focus was studying the Luke Fildes Papers at the National Art Library which contain decades of correspondence between Fildes and the artist Henry Woods, his brother-in-law and confidant. During my time in London, I also benefited from multiple visits to the Tate Gallery, which allowed me to view the painting in situ, as well as to the Tate Archives where I was able to understand Henry Tate’s commission, situate The Doctor in the historical and political context of the period and examine its early reception. Following my work in London, I travelled to Liverpool where my archival research was concentrated largely at the Liverpool Records Office which holds records related to the Hahnemann Hospital. The Hahnemann Hospital opened in 1887 and was a gift from Henry Tate to the citizens of Liverpool. My investigation related to a photograph of the children’s ward which features a reproduction of The Doctor that hung as part of the hospital’s interior decoration. Documents related to the commission of the hospital and its interiors were vital to my understanding of the painting’s ideological power in medical spaces. My archival research in the United Kingdom laid the foundation for my exploration into the painting’s continued power in contemporary medical spaces as well as its circulation in the United States. As a result, I made multiple trips to America with the purpose of visiting hospitals and their archives to probe the deeply embedded nature of The Doctor in modern and contemporary medical spheres. My archival research in London and the United States led me to make crucial connections regarding the image’s use and circulation within an American context. As a result, in 2024, I was awarded the Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Fellowship at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

In addition to supporting my archival research, the Research Support Grant from PMC provided critical funding for childcare while I travelled. As a new parent navigating academia, this support was invaluable and allowed me to complete the archival research for my dissertation which I plan to submit and defend in the spring of 2025. Moreover, as a Filipino art historian working in the field of British visual culture this grant allowed me to make vital connections with others working in the fields of art history, histories of medicine and the critical medical humanities and contributed to a more inclusive perspective in conversations about health, medicine and visual culture.