Image Gallery

Diagnostic technology: a physician examining a urine flask.
The Physician (1653), oil painting by Gerrit Dou.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images.
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0
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The narrative starting point for diagnosis: a physician talking to a patient about his illness; the patient is holding a basket containing a urine flask. Engraving, ca. 16th–17th century. The legend states that God is the only physician who can truly save patients from death.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images.
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons
Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Physical examination in diagnosis: a physician feeling the pulse of a seated woman patient, urine flask in the other hand.
Oil painting (ca. 1700) by Mathijs Naiveu.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images.
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0
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The solemnity of the diagnostic pronouncement.
The Physician’s Verdict (1857), oil painting by Émile-Carolus Leclercq.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The distressing power of the diagnostic moment: a physician delivers the diagnosis to his patient; at the door a woman cries on hearing the patient’s fate.
From an Arzneibuch (ca. 1675), a compendium of popular medicine and surgery, receipts, etc., compiled for the use of a house of the Franciscan order, probably in Austria or South Germany.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The authority of the physician conferred by prognosis: a physician telling a patient that he is going to die; the patient stares out at the viewer.
Color photogravure of Sentence of Death (1908) by John Collier.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The movie Still Alice (Sony Pictures Classics, 2015) dramatizes one woman and her family’s experience of early-onset Alzheimer disease, capturing the drama of diagnosis in the popular media of cinema.

The threat of social media to the authority of the doctor is immediately apparent to readers of this cartoon.

Credit: David Sipress/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank.

Used by permission.