Henry Ford Hospital (painting)

Henry Ford Hospital is a 1932 oil-on-metal painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo about her experience of delivering a dead male fetus on 4 July at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, United States, when she was approximately 31⁄2 months pregnant. Depictions of childbirth, abortion, or miscarriage are rare in the canon of Western painting, and Kahlo is "one of the only major artists to directly communicate her reproductive grief through visual art." The "bloody and terrifying" painting opened a defining and influential era of Kahlo's career. The painting's first title was The Lost Desire. An alternate title is The Flying Bed (La Cama Volando).

Pregnancy and loss

Frida Kahlo had a complicated obstetric/gynecological medical history. She survived a catastrophic traffic accident in which her pelvis had been broken and her vagina had been pierced by a metal bar. She likely had uterine scarring. She also had post-polio symptoms; her father had epilepsy, which she was apparently concerned would be a genetic trait passed on to her children; she was plagued with chronic back pain and assorted infections; and by all accounts she desperately wanted to have a baby fathered by her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera.

Kahlo was 24 years old at the time of her summer 1932 pregnancy. Per Kahlo's biographer Hayden Herrera, on 26 May she wrote her friend and advisor Dr.