초록/요약

The Doctor, painted in 1891 by the English artist Luke Fildes, has been widely hailed as one of the most famous medical images in the history of Western art. Set in an impoverished rural English cottage, it highlights the moment of life and death facing a sick child, attended by a caring doctor, and presents the doctor as an unsung hero of the weak. Drawing largely on a variety of contemporary reviews of the picture scattered in newspapers and magazines, many of which have remained hitherto undiscovered, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it reconstructs the immediate contexts in which the painting was produced and received. In the process such obvious misinformation, still widely circulating on the internet, that it was commissioned by Queen Victoria is definitely quashed. Second, it argues that Fildes succeeded in giving a concrete visual form to an invisible image of the ideal family doctor in Victorian Britain, and that this success was at the heart of the painting's immense popularity at the end of the nineteenth century. The image of the selfless family doctor, however, is illusory as the vision of selflessness itself may be an illusion that has hardly existed in reality but only in art.