AN IMPERFECT DEPICTION: Jean-Paul Marat was described as ugly and deformed, but in the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David, “instead of an emaciated figure with ugly skin lesions all over his body, we see almost this classical figure,” notes Toby Gelfand of the University of Ottawa. This choice may reflect more than aesthetics, he says, for physical symptoms such as Marat’s were seen as reflecting mental problems, too—and perhaps as incompatible with a heroic “friend of the people.”PAINTING BY JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
French radical Jean-Paul Marat famously died in his bathtub in 1793, stabbed by Charlotte Corday to put an end to his revolutionary activities. “I killed one man to save 100,000,” Corday told a court before she was executed just days after murdering him.
But before he became a revolutionary and then a martyr, Marat was a well-regarded physician and scientist. Born in 1743 in what is now Switzerland, he studied medicine in France before moving to England to begin practicing, despite not having earned a degree. It was there that he published medical papers on gonorrhea and eye diseases—which won him a medical degree from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland—as well as his first political work, Chains of Slavery.
In 1776, Marat returned ...
