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Leo and Frida

By Catherine Reef, Stanford Medicine (Summer 2013)

Do you think it would be more dangerous to abort than to have a child?… If, on the contrary, you think having the child might improve my condition, then, in that case, I’d like you to tell me if it would be preferable for me to go to Mexico in August and have the baby there in the company of my mother and sisters, or whether it might be best to wait for it to be born here. … Doctorcito, you have no idea how embarrassed I am to bother you with these questions, but I see you not so much as my doctor as my best friend, and your opinion would help me more than you know.

Excerpt of a letter from Frida Kahlo, in Detroit, to Stanford surgeon Leo Eloesser, MD, May 26, 1932. From Querido Doctorcito (El Equilibrista, 2007).

She would later emerge as one of the world’s greatest self-portraitists, but in December 1930 Frida Kahlo was unknown. She had come to San Francisco with her husband, the famous muralist Diego Rivera, who was there to paint frescoes, including one for the San Francisco Stock Exchange. Kahlo was 23, and this was her first visit to the United States.

Plagued by a chronically painful right foot, she consulted Leo Eloesser, MD, a noted thoracic and orthopedic surgeon at Stanford’s medical school. He proposed little in the way of treatment beyond rest and healthy living, but Kahlo was grateful enough to paint his portrait. In it, the short, dark 49-year-old stands with his head jutting characteristically forward. Beside him is a model sailboat, emblematic of his passion for nighttime sailing on the bay.

With that gift of a painting, a loving friendship was born — one that would enhance two remarkable lives.

“I hate domesticity,” said Leo Eloesser. “Conventions were no bother to Leo,” wrote his biographer. Neither were they to Frida Kahlo.

The letters and journals that Kahlo and Eloesser left behind reveal a bond that went far beyond the doctor-patient relationship. She wrote him passionate missives confiding not only her physical pains but also her deeply private emotional suffering. He was a ready listener, offering medical and moral support along with a generous dose of affection and playful wit. He even served as a go-between in her turbulent relationship with Rivera. He was awed by her talent, intelligence and audacity, and he found in her a kindred spirit, someone acutely interested in the world’s cultures and in helping those who were less privileged.

Kahlo, a native of Mexico City, disliked most of the Americans she met. “They are boring and they all have faces like unbaked rolls,” she complained in a letter to a Mexican friend. Eloesser, however, seemed different. He spoke fluent Spanish and had an intensity and intelligence that attracted her, notes art historian Hayden Herrera in her biography Frida (Harper & Row, 1983). Also, his left-wing political views were compatible with hers, as she was an ardent communist.

Eloesser, for his part, “had a true love of art and artists,” observed his friend and biographer, Harris Shumacker Jr., MD, in a 1984 article in the medical journal The Pharos. He took special pleasure in the company of painters and sculptors, calling them “a carefree lot, generous and liberal in recognition of their fellow artists as well as in their readiness to help,” as noted in Shumacker’s biography, Leo Eloesser, M.D.: Eulogy for a Free Spirit.

Eloesser was leading a full life when he and Kahlo crossed paths. He was chief of Stanford’s surgical service at San Francisco County Hospital (now SF General) and clinical professor of surgery at Stanford’s School of Medicine, which was then in San Francisco. A famed diagnostician, he had a thriving private practice and operated at five other city hospitals. “Leo was a workhorse. He had no concept of time, night or day,” said a junior associate at the county hospital, according to The History of the Surgical Service at San Francisco General Hospital (2007). He played viola with members of the San Francisco Symphony in an ensemble that met in his apartment each Wednesday. He frequently took out his sloop, the Flirt, often with a companion, often female. He deflected questions about his single status with statements quoted in Shumacker’s biography such as “I hate domesticity.” Commented Shumacker, “Conventions were no bother to Leo.”

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