FRIDA'S PAIN The painter transformed her suffering into art. What caused her agony - and what does it say about medicine then, and today?

Frida Kahlo's physical and emotional suffering is as famous as the paintings in which she graphically deconstructed it.

Yet it remains a subject of speculation and reinterpretation more than half a century after the Mexican Modernist's death at age 47. The mythic quality of her agonies is part of the allure of exhibits like the one now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Parts of Kahlo's medical history will always be puzzling, but one thing is clear: She survived a horrific streetcar accident in 1925, a time when even the best hospitals in the world - and she certainly wasn't in one - could offer trauma victims little more than morphine. Blood transfusions, antibiotics, mechanical ventilation, anticoagulants, and modern orthopedic surgery - not to mention the science of physical rehabilitation - were years or decades away.

"To survive this in 1925 was close to a miracle, even at age 18," said Robert Ostrum, a Cooper University Hospital orthopedic trauma surgeon who treated New Jersey Gov. Corzine after his car crash. "If she had been 50 or 60, it would have been a death sentence."

Kahlo's unconventional unibrowed beauty, her exuberance, her tumultuous marriage (twice) to the philandering Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and her friendships (some of them intimate) with cognoscenti ranging from Leon Trotsky to Henry Ford, are well documented. Photographs, correspondence, news coverage of the time, and the diary she wrote in her last decade of life, all attest to her larger-than-life life.

However, few of Kahlo's original medical records survived her. Most of what is known about her physical ills comes from the recollections of her contemporaries, or from a source sometimes given to hyperbole - Kahlo herself.

"She was one of the creators of her own legendary status," art critic Hayden Herrera wrote in her acclaimed 1983 biography, Frida.

Herrera, an organizer of the exhibit in Philadelphia, researched Kahlo in the 1970s. Even back then - before Fridamania turned the artist into an icon - her diagnoses, treatments and torments were sketchy.

"There's so much conflicting information," Herrera said by phone last week from her New York City home.

For example, Kahlo's classmates mocked her as "peg-leg" because her right leg was thinner and shorter than the other. Most biographers, including Herrera, attribute this to a bout with polio when Kahlo was 6 years old.