【叙事医学之绘画艺术】

Self-portrait with Dr. Farill (1951) 

Self Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill, 1951 - by Frida Kahlo

This painting is Frida's last signed self-portrait. In this portrait, she painted herself with her surgeon Doctor Juan Farill.

Dr. Farill performed 7 surgeries on Frida's spine in the year of 1951. She had to stay in the hospital in Mexico City for 9 months. In November of 1951, she finally recovered and was able to paint again. The first painting she painted was this self-portrait and she dedicated this painting to Dr. Farill. She wrote in her diary: "I was sick for a year....seven operations on my spine.Dr. Farill saved me. " She painted this portrait in a "ex-voto (retablo)" due to the fact she credited Dr. Farill for saving her life. In this portrait, she was sitting in a wheelchair, hold her heart palette in one hand, and brushes in another. It implied she was painting using her own blood from her heart.

Frida may resemble Francisco Goya to paint this portrait. Goya painted a 'retablo style" self-portrait called "Goya Attended by Doctor Arrieta". In that painting, Goya included an inscription to thank the doctor for saving his life.

这幅画是弗里达最后一幅签名自画像。在这幅肖像中，她画了自己和她的外科医生胡安·法里尔医生。

1951年，法里尔医生为弗里达进行了7次脊柱手术。她不得不在墨西哥城的医院住了9个月。1951年11月，她终于康复并能再次作画。她画的第一幅画是这幅自画像，她把这幅画献给法里尔博士。她在日记中写道：“我病了一年......我的脊柱做了七次手术。法里尔医生救了我。”她在“ex-voto（retablo）”中画了这幅肖像，因为她相信法里尔博士救了她的命。在这幅肖像中，她坐在轮椅上，一手拿着心形调色板，另一只手拿着画笔。这意味着她正在用自己内心的血液进行绘画。

弗里达可能会像弗朗西斯科·戈雅（Francisco Goya）画这幅肖像。戈雅画了一幅“雷塔布洛风格”的自画像，名为《阿列塔医生照顾戈雅》。在那幅画中，戈雅有一段题词，感谢医生救了他的命。

“I’ve been sick for a year now. Seven operations on my spinal column. Dr. Farill saved me. He brought me back the joy of life,” writes acclaimed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (252) in her diary between 1950 and 1951. Kahlo painted Self-portrait with the portrait of Dr. Farill (1951) in gratitude and recognition of her doctor for restoring her will to live. This painting seems similar to previous pieces of art dedicated to her physicians, that is, Portrait of Dr. Eloesser (1931) and Self Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser (1940). However, Self-portrait with Dr. Farill is somehow different. While it is an expression of gratitude to the surgeon who has helped her to walk again (Kahlo was a woman in lifelong pain after suffering from poliomyelitis and a severe bus accident that left her multiply injured), the message ---relevant to healthcare professionals--- is deceivably deeper and richer than that.

Self-portrait with Dr. Farill (1951) has been traditionally interpreted as an ex-voto, a testimony to Farill’s medical help. However, it can be read as far more than a reification of a medical practitioner. Kahlo is an artist well known for her explorations of embodied and emotional pain. Yet, what makes this particular work valuable in the teaching of medical trainees is the subtle reversal of the traditional asymmetric power dynamic between doctors and patients. Here it is not the doctor who diagnoses the patient but rather, and as memoirist

Anatole Broyard observes, the patient who diagnoses the doctor. In keeping with the practice of Narrative Medicine, this pictorial narrative can be used to cultivate self-awareness and

imagination among clinicians.

Self Portrait with portrait of Dr. Farill is a painting within a painting, an effect known as mise en abîme. Kahlo paints herself as the artist who has completed the painting of the physician

(notably, as the art critic Sarah Lowe observes, this is the only time in Kahlo’s work that she represents herself as an artist). This choice, which portrays Kahlo in the pursuit of her life’s

passion (painting) after almost a year of hospitalization, is thanks to Dr. Farill’s medical art in saving her life, as she states.

In the painting we observe that in Kahlo’s lap is her palette/open heart, center of creativity and life force from which it emerges Dr. Farill’s portrait. It is, then, Kahlo’s

embodied reality that gives birth to the face/portrait of the surgeon, and her very blood that gives rise to his visage. In the illusion created by the mise en abîme, Kahlo’s self-portrait is

represented as a non-fiction. In contrast, Dr. Farill is represented as a larger-than-life portrait,and thereby in the realm of the fiction. His image sits on the sawhorse as if were on a pedestal.

In other words, Kahlo, the patient/the artist, is alive while her doctor is a being immortalized,objectified by means of her work of art. Kahlo’s aliveness is also suggested by the blood stains

on her white tunic, as the expression of her sacrifice in surviving as seen as in the act of