Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President’s Council on Bioethics

W hile most of the art world turned to abstraction towards the middle of the twentieth century, Philadelphia-born Alice Neel (1900-1984) courageously chose to remain a figure painter.Occasionally she painted the rich and famous-artists, playwrights, scientists, even a papal nuncio-but mostly her subjects were the unnoticed, the overlooked, the difficult.They were her neighbors in Spanish Harlem: stay-at-home mothers, pregnant mothers, door-to-door salesmen, restaurant workers, tradesmen.Nor did she shy away from those most would rather not confront-a dying, querulous old woman, a middle-aged man in the late stages of cancer, a young man ravaged by tuberculosis.But whether her subjects are young, old, famous, unknown, nude or clothed, Neel's gift was to reveal their common denominator: an ineffable, undefinable, invisible human quality we call dignity.T. B. Harlem, completed in 1940, is one of the most well-known of Neel's paintings.Gaunt and resigned, the subject could have been a young man dying on a battlefield of World War II pinned with a medal of honor.Instead he is a young man in a Harlem hospital fighting an all too prevalent disease to the death.His badge of honor covers the wound of thoracoplasty, or surgically induced lung collapse, then a radical treatment of last resort for tuberculosis.Neel also accurately portrays the side-effects of both the treatment and the disease: owing to the loss of several ribs on the affected side, compensatory thoracic and cervical curvatures of the spine pull it into the opposite directions of an S-curve.Atrophied muscles of the arms and hands and the lax abdominal muscles suggest that the battle has been a long one; the atrophy is the result of disuse, the protuberant abdomen indicative of a long-standing lack of proper nutrition.But Neel's painting is not a medical treatise on tuberculosis.It is rather an eloquent essay on the inherent dignity of human beings that exists quite independently of exterior circumstances.