Sculpture: Case Histories in Clay

Art has given features to half-remembered kings and evoked the majesty and terror of all-but-forgotten religions. Now Dr. Abner Weisman, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology, has shown that sculpture can be a guide to the pathology of the past. On view at Manhattan’s Pfizer Building is his unique collection of pre-Columbian figures, each of which is a medical case history in clay.

Dr. Weisman began collecting back in 1944 when, working with American Indians, he acquired herbs, roots and amulets that were used to cure diseases. While traveling in Mexico, he noticed that many pre-Columbian figurines had physical defects, concluded that they were meant to tell a story, possibly a medical story.

Since then he has gathered the largest such collection in the U.S. One figure, a beautifully preserved Peruvian drinking vessel, has a black-spotted face, black hands, a lip partially eaten away —symptoms of leprosy. Others lie on hospital beds, held down by restraining bonds as if they had a violent illness. Some seem to show the ravages of smallpox, cancer, dropsy, malnutrition, and give evidence of impressive achievements in techniques of amputation and other surgery a thousand years before Columbus. Pregnancy, an annual event, is portrayed as a happy occurrence, except for one rare sculpture of a dejected girl at term. Dr. Weisman speculates that “she’s only eleven or twelve. I think it is her first baby and she’s worried about it.” A series of works showing midline incisions in pregnant women suggests that caesarean sections may have been common.

Archaeologists can only speculate on the role such art played in primitive society. Weisman believes many pieces were used for teaching; other experts think the sculptures, found in graves like most art of the era, may have been a means of recording the cause of death. About their artistry, historians need not be so cautious. The sculptural accuracy displayed is astonishing, the pathos profoundly touching.