The Scholarly Legacy of

Home Page and Site Overview by Bert Hansen

This web site honors the memory of the late Richard E. Weisberg of New York City, a passionate and dedicated teacher and scholar, and it provides public access to his magnum opus on art and medicine in nineteenth-century France.  Until his unexpected illness and death in 2011, Richard was my former student, scholarly collaborator, and friend.

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To afford historians, scientists, and students better access to Richard’s full scholarly legacy, this web page hosts his complete doctoral dissertation, “The Representation of Doctors at Work in Salon Art of the Early Third Republic in France” (New York University, 1995).  The dissertation’s core research questions originated in a history of medicine course I offered at NYU in the fall of 1987.  Richard took them up, with research in libraries and archives here and abroad while continuing full-time professional work as a teacher and a principal in the New York City’s public schools.

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Richard’s thesis was formally supervised by Tony Judt.  The examining committee consisted of Judt, Gerald Geison of Princeton University, Linda Nochlin of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, and me.

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The richly detailed dissertation has not become as widely known as it deserves to be though it has long been available from University Microfilms International.  The gap arose in part because professional and family responsibilities prevented him from publishing scholarly articles on this research that would have alerted scholars to the contributions made in his dissertation.  Only seven library copies are listed in Worldcat: McGill University, the National Library of Medicine, New York University, Queens University (Canada), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Universitaetsbibliothek Mainz, and the Wellcome Library.

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This site makes the dissertation text readily accessible as a series of eight PDF files scanned from the original pages thanks to the gracious and generous assistance of Richard’s wife, Kathryn Annette Clark, and support from the George and Mildred Weissman School of Arts and Sciences of Baruch College.

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The international union catalogue of library holdings (worldcat.org) includes an entry for this site at OCLC Number:798332717.