By John Pope, The Times-Picayune
November 15, 2009, 4:56AM
When students head into the library at LSU Health Sciences Center to prepare for their professional lives, they can’t help getting a crash course in medical history.
When students head into the library at LSU Health Sciences Center to prepare for their professional lives, they can’t help getting a crash course in medical history.
hold an array of old medical instruments: some fascinating, some scary and one, a silver device that looks like an apple corer embedded in an avocado seed, positively mysterious.
One case contains rows of beautifully labeled bottles that once held such portions as ipecac, which was designed to induce vomiting, and swamp root, which cleaned out the kidneys.
But clearly the dominant piece in this 3,200-square-foot area, known as the Library Commons, is a massive silver-colored Art Deco frieze, “The Conquest of Yellow Fever,” by Enrique Alferez, the Mexican-born sculptor who settled in New Orleans in 1929 and spent the next seven decades creating works for buildings all over the city. They include the gigantic frieze over Charity Hospital’s main entrance and sculptures for City Park.
The 12-foot-long LSU piece, which weighs 600 pounds, sits in a specially created niche in a lounge area that, with its Eames chairs and hanging egg-like lights, looks like a set for “Mad Men,” the television series set in the early 1960s.
The piece was mounted late last year in the middle of a wall of iridescent tiles designed to evoke Charity Hospital, said Wayne Troyer, the lead architect. It is expected to be its permanent home in what has been a peripatetic 78-year existence.
Alferez created the sculpture for LSU’s School of Medicine, and it hung in the lobby of its original building, at 1542 Tulane Ave., when the school opened in 1931.
The model for the dominant female figure, who could be Hygieia, the goddess of health, was a Charity Hospital nurse, said Debbie Sibley, the center’s associate director of libraries.
The powerful woman stands with outstretched arms between two groups of people. On the left is a rural family, with a man in the throes of yellow fever, which could be fatal. On the right side is a much happier family of city dwellers.
The reason for the difference is in the middle of the frieze. There stands the team, led by Dr. Walter Reed, that established at the end of the 19th century that mosquitoes transmitted the disease. That discovery led to public-health measures such as screened windows and cisterns that helped wipe out yellow fever; a 1905 outbreak in New Orleans was the last in the United States.
The frieze has strong local ties, and not just because of the sculptor, his model and the fact that yellow fever was once a regular scourge in New Orleans.
In front of the triumphant woman are four men, including Reed, who discovered the cause of yellow fever. The man in the middle is Dr. Aristides Agramonte, who was not only one of Reed’s colleagues but also the choice to lead the new medical school’s tropical-medicine department. He died before he could move to New Orleans, but he willed his books to the school, and they became the nucleus of its library, Sibley said.
Alferez’s frieze, which originally was coated in ground aluminum and banana oil, gained a coating of green paint during the 1950s, when the walls were being painted, Sibley said.
It was chiseled out of the wall during a renovation in 1987 because the ceiling was going to be dropped, a move that would have hidden the frieze.
Judith Caruthers, then the center’s library director, and Dr. Robert Daniels, the medical school’s dean then, recognized the piece’s importance and the need to restore it. The frieze was moved to the building that is its current homein 1989 and, 10 years later, it was entrusted to Lynn Harrington, who restored it….Read entire article here: http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2009/11/post_47.html
Filed under: Medicine & Humanities | Tagged: art
