This is a small pen & ink/watercolor of Victorian-era surgeons I did while watching a David Lynch film set during this period. I look at surgery during the 19th century with horror and morbid fascination. It was bloody, brutal and for the most part ineffective. The chances of dying on the operating table were so high that most people avoided hospitals as a last resort. Victorian-era hospitals were unsanitary and overcrowded. Surgeons during this period had very little knowledge or understanding of germs and infection and took a rather perverse pride in having a bloodied apron. A surgeon with a clean smock was seen as inactive whereas a surgeon with an apron covered in blood was considered busy. In fact bloodied aprons were hung on racks for weeks without being laundered and when it was time to get to work they would simply slip the dirty apron over their everyday clothes and go to it.