I saw Thomas Eakins "The Gross Clinic" for the first time when I was nine or ten. And I was mesmerized. I have no idea what I was thinking at the time. But it was probably about how gory it was. You could see blood and sliced flesh. The brown haired men surrounding the patient may as well have been bobble head dolls captured in mid-nod staring at the awful open wound. But as riveting at the surgical gore was, what fascinated me most were the clutched horrified fingers of the human figure in the lower left.

What's up the that?

Everyone else looks so calm and businesslike. The big shiney-foreheaded guy standing in the middle reminded me of Dr. Zorba, played by actor Sam Jaffee, on the popular TV doctor drama Ben Casey M.D., starring Vince Edwards. But it was those hands and fingers, curled in horror that glued my eyes. I had no idea that I was looking at a great American masterpiece. I was drawn to "The Gross Clinic" the same way I was drawn to the giant painting of" Prometheus Bound" at the Art Museum -- I didn't know much about art but I did know gore when I saw it, and the painting showing a man's liver being eaten by an eagle, or a man being sliced open by doctors with blood on their hands was everything a little boy could want.

Sometime during the 1970's I became aware of Thomas Eakins reputation as one of the greatest artists in America, and certainly the most important artist ever to emerge from Philadelphia. He was an odd duck, Thomas Eakins. He made people nervous. A lot of Philadelphians wished he would just go away. And now, ironically, it's going to cost the city's angels at least $68 million to keep Eakins ' The Gross Clinic" from going to Walmart.

How do I feel about that? I feel like cringing with curled fingers and muttering, "The horror. . .the horror. . ."

I paid my first visit to "The Gross Clinic" in many years this afternoon. It is still at Thomas Jefferson University and you can see it and other Eakins' portraits hanging in the gallery on the first floor of Alumni Hall on Locust Street between 10th and 11th. There is no admission charge. The painting is bigger than I remember it being, which is unusual since a child's memory is always huge. I suppose that's because I never stood so close to it and it was always high up on the wall in the two-story lobby. Here in the intimate dimness of the Eakins Gallery under high intensity spotlights "The Gross Clinic" seems to explode off the west wall. All the dark ghostly figures of medical students watching the operation above and behind Dr. Gross (unseen in the cropped photo above) are clearly visible. The detail is spectacular.

The cringing woman with the fingers is somehow less noticeable when viewed up close, but no less dramatic. Part of the reason her hands are so striking is that they aren't only her hands-- that's why she seems to have six fingers. There is a man sitting behind Dr. Gross who has reached out and placed his right hand and fingers on top of her left hand, apparently in a comforting gesture. In his left hand that same man is holding the forceps/spreader which pulls back the flesh of the patient's thigh. You can see this in miniature three-dimensional diorama of the painting on the opposite wall of the gallery.

As I stood in front of this $68 million dollar something, it occurred to me that this 11-by-7-foot piece of decorated canvas was worth more than the Louisiana Purchase in today's dollars. In fact, based on the Walmart pricing for new world land in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson more than doubled the size of the existing United States by buying the vast middle of America from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada from the war-prone and cash-needy Napoleon Bonaparte for $11 million, the $68 million value of this Eakins' painting could have could have purchased Alaska, Hawaii and all of the place we call home from sea to shining sea.

Imagine standing in front of that on a Thursday afternoon.