Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic is rejected…

Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic is rejected for the art exhibition at the Centennial Exposition.

Dismayed, he has to exhibit it in a medical section.

Critics and public alike respond to the painting with distaste, finding offensive and unacceptable the immediate facts of blood and pain and suffering in Philadelphia.

While Eakins' Victorian contemporaries can accept historical scenes of grisly martyrdoms or bloody massacres without qualm, they cannot appreciate a picture that is neither entertaining nor ennobling but simply a frank statement of contemporary reality.