1999

Emerging Infectious Diseases

American, born 1948

In 1948, with financial support from the pharmaceutical company Smith Kline and French Laboratories (now GlaxoSmithKline), the Museum initiated the Ars Medica Collection of works of art on paper with medical subjects; it now includes more than 2,500 prints, drawings, and photographs. Eric Avery, an ars medica artist par excellence, works both as a psychiatrist with AIDS patients and as a printmaker who uses art to educate, inspire, provoke, and console those affected with the disease. This recent linocut enlarges and transforms a late fifteenth-century woodcut by depicting an isolation room with patients suffering from such present-day afflictions as multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, HIV, hepatitis C, and West Nile virus.