I enjoy this Smithsonian site that always comes up with interesting stuff. I have no idea how they can see any disease in this picture. But to learn that a figure in the painting is even ill amazes me.
The painting is an Enlightenment masterpiece depicting an engrossed scientist pumping the air out of a glass chamber with a cockatoo inside to demonstrate the properties of a vacuum as spectators looked on. Notably, the man standing to the right of the scientist has a nasty, bumpy rash on his face and hands.
“When we look at the painting with much higher detail, it is clear the father character has a skin rash that is consistent with the disease of dermatomyositis,” Ashrafian tells Lorenzi. Dermatomyositis is an inflammatory disease affecting both the muscles and the skin. The rashes on the father's hands were the telltale signs of the disease known as Gottron's Papules. Yet Wright recorded the affliction long before scientists described dermatomyositis in 1891.
“The depiction of the disease is so clear and accurate in the painting that it must have reflected the actual existence of an underlying disease in the portrayed father character,” Ashrafian says.
Read more: History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian
