Amputation: A Dramatic Act

Dawn Kemp is talking about a stolen painting at The Hunterian Museum on Thursday 29 October, and the story behind the work is almost as dramatic as the scene it depicts. The painting is called Amputation, an oil on canvas from the mid-1700s that shows a male patient having his left leg removed in an operating theatre, surrounded by medical men. It was stolen from the museum in the 1980s and only recently recovered, so this is one of the first times it's being discussed in public since it came back home.

For a long time, the painting was thought to be a general scene of Georgian surgery. In the 1960s, it was attributed to the men's operating theatre at St Thomas's Hospital in London. But Kemp, the Director of Museums at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, is presenting new evidence about where the painting actually came from. She argues that it's not just a medical record, but a window into the social networks that tied together medicine, the arts, the theatre and the nobility in Georgian London. It's a rare visual account of how surgery was actually practised in mid-18th-century Britain, and the talk is followed by a Q&A.

If you want to see the painting for yourself, you can. After the talk, you can head into the museum's temporary exhibition, The Operating Theatre: 250 Years of Surgery in Hospital, where Amputation is on display. It's a good chance to see the work up close and get a proper look at the details Kemp spends the evening talking through.

The talk runs from 19:00 to 20:15, and there's special late access to the museum from 17:30 to 18:45 if you want to wander around before it starts. Tickets are £8, and the museum is at 43 Lincoln's Inn Fields, Holborn, WC2A 3PE.