Of all of the works by 19th-century painter Vincent Van Gogh, perhaps he’s most well known for his sunflowers. The flowers, arranged in a vase, are cast in shades of yellow and brown, simultaneously signaling life along with impending death and decay.
His use of color is legendary among students and appreciators of art, and doctors and medical researchers have used his sometimes-surreal pallet as a basis for diagnosing Van Gogh with a panoply of medical disorders. In the past decades, paper authors and letter writers in the Journal of the American Medical Association have speculated that his odd color-sense was caused by the toxic side effects of epilepsy treatment, an herb used to make absinthe, as well as a variety of eye problems, from ...
