Great artists get sick like anyone else and a professor at Georgetown University believes he can tell from temporal arteritis, an inflammation of an artery on his temple. He cites a self- portrait painted nearly 350 years ago now in Washington’s National Gallery of Art . He says Michelangelo had gout. Dr. Espinel directs the Blood Pressure Center in suburban Arilnngton, Virginia. His articles art Dr.Garlos Espinal says Rembrandt suffered from temporal arteritis, an inflammation of an artery on his temple. He cites a self-portrait painted nearly 350 years ago now in Washington’s National Gallery of Art. He says Michelangelo had gout. Dr. Espinel directs the Blood Pressure Centre in suburban Arlington, Virginia. His articles on what he calls “Art-Medicine” appear in the British medical weekly, The Lancer, and he teacher a course in the subject and another in blood pressure at Geogetown. Dr. Espinel has advised the president of Comlombia on health policy and devised a simple test for kidney failure. He studied the role of salt in blood pressure that was instrumental in getting the US Congress to pass the law on nutrition labels or processed food. He developed his interest in art almost by accident. “I strolled into the Nation Gallery one day”. he said, “and there I was facing all those great minds-some of the greatest minds ever. It was like a new world.” Dr. Espinal soon found himself doing medical research on the gallery’s self-portrait by Rembrandt., “One has to scrutinize each brush stoke,” he wrote in The Lancet. “Notice that in… other portraits Rembrandt places the light on the right. But in the Washington portrait he puts it directly on his forehead, on his left temporal artery, as if to say: “Look at me. Look what is happening to me.” Dr. Fracis Robiscsek, medical director of the Carolinas Heart Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina, said he did not know Dr. Espinel’s work but urged caution in identifying disease from paintings. He noted that considerable work has been done on then subject. “There are some who think the Mona Lisa’s smile is evidence of a partial paralysis of a branch of face muscle,” he said.