Frida Kahlo and her doctors

The two great Mexican painters, Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera, were among the earliest media celebrities. They were so widely known in the 1930’s and 40 s that people across America and in Europe often referred to them just by their first names, and would have instantly recognised any image of them. Visually, they were a spectacular couple. Frida was small, delicate, androgynous and arrestingly beautiful. Diego was twenty years older, three times her weight, bulbous-eyed and impressively ugly. While pursuing their respective careers as the greatest self-portraitist and muralist of their age, they each led luridly promiscuous love lives. They set the trend for future celebrities by divorcing and then remarrying. They both confabulated outrageously, telling melodramatic and contradictory versions of their own or each others’ stories. Among their acquaintance they included Pablo Picasso, the billionaire John D Rockefeller, and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, with whom Frida had an affair while he was their house guest. Frida’s medical history was notoriously tragic. She was born in 1907 with an undiagnosed scoliosis. At the age of six, she contracted polio (or a polio-like illness) that affected the muscles of her right leg.1 With characteristic will-power, she recovered well enough to run and dance, but at 18 she was a passenger in a catastrophic collision, when a bus she was travelling on was sliced in two by a tram. Frida was impaled by a severed handrail that pierced the left side of her abdomen and emerged through her pelvic outlet. She sustained multiple fractures including eleven in her weak right leg, dislocation and crush fractures of her right foot, as well as fractures of her lumbar spine that were only discovered some months later. The accident determined the rest of her life. She gave up an ambition to …