I AM not sure whether the name of the Rt Hon. Jeremy Hunt MP has ever graced this page. I suspect not. The question is not intended to be facetious. As an art critic, I might have expected to come across him when he was Culture Minister; but, apart from the scorn that many of his under-funded, ill-resourced projects attracted, he seemed more interested in communications media than in art or culture.

Now, if I come across his name at all, it is as a parish priest, working in a borough that is about to lose a newly opened A&E unit in order to save money for a Health Trust in another borough, with the threat of closing the much needed maternity unit and selling off land, etc., etc. Three-quarters of a million residents in a London borough will be left to find health provision elsewhere.

If the Secretary of State has any interest in art, he might like, before dismantling yet more of the Health Service that has, for the past 65 years, served the nation so well, to see this extraordinary exhibition, as much for the life story of its artist as for the quality of the images.

Nathaniel Hepburn's distinctive exhibition is not intended to be read politically. But it is timely, as it makes inescapable the political arena in which Barbara Hepworth was working and struggling.

Hepworth, as is known, first became directly involved and interested in the work of surgeons in 1944, when her own daughter was diagnosed with osteomyelitis. Mounting medical bills faced her and her husband, Ben Nicholson; but the friendship of Norman Capener, a hand surgeon in Cornwall, found several ways out of this predicament for them.

He waived some of his fee, transferred Sarah from the local hospital to Exeter, encouraged Hepworth to watch him perform in the operating theatre, and, if hospital rumour is to be believed, may have become more involved with the sculptor in non-professional discourse.

Capener was also an amateur artist and sculptor. Hepworth responded warmly to his invitation to witness an operation, after an initial fear that it would reduce her from artist to voyeur. She produced her first dated hospital drawing on 14 November 1947 as Aneurin Bevan steered Henry Willink's 1944 White Paper towards founding the NHS.

Over a two-year period (the last in the series seems to be Scalpel II of July 1949), she produced some 80 drawings, most of which are on show here.

Later in London, she watched the Melbourne dentist-turned-surgeon Edward Garnett Passe, another amateur sculptor, perform delicate ear fenestrations on Wednesday mornings at the London Clinic, where he had become the leading otolaryngologist.

Passe, too, became a friend, and, when he died, it was in a road crash on his way back from a holiday that he spent at St Ives in 1952 with his wife, when he had been working alongside Hepworth in her studio. It seems that he had first met Hepworth in London at the time of her first show of these hospital drawings at the Lefevre Gallery.

On London afternoons, she could also observe the celebrated Sir Reginald Watson-Jones, whose work had changed orthopaedic surgery in Britain. His preference for casting and longer-term immobilisation rather than the cheaper current practice of splintage and nothing else became standard for fracture care.

That Hepworth's drawings have a certain sculptural quality about them is no great surprise; in them, she often carved with a pencil, "like the act of a chisel through slate", as she said, and scraped off the Ripolin paint (a medium she preferred to gesso, but which has a similar texture) with a razor, as a sculptor might finish a work in stone or wood.

What gives the drawings the air of Piero-like intensity and silence is the hard lighting from the arc lamp hanging above the patient. This illuminates the protagonists as if trapped in a stage tableau. Sir Herbert Read, the Yorkshire art critic and anarchist, writing a review of her work in The Listener for 8 April 1948, made telling account of the idea of the operating "theatre" as a performative space.

In his review, Read also made comparison of the work to the "austere humanism of the Quattrocento in Italy", which seems to catch the mood of them exquisitely well. Hepworth herself loved Masaccio, and there is something profoundly, almost disquietingly, abstemious about each of the bared images, as if they are locked in a deeply heard silence at the heart of all the business going on around the surgeons.

The mood of the nation, with the newly formed NHS, responded warmly; more than a quarter of the drawings shown at the Lefevre Gallery in London in April 1948 were snapped up by local authorities, and to this day many are to be found in city municipal collections.

Some of the finished paintings are even more widely spread; the Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams Foundation in Melbourne recently acquired (2010) a second Hepworth painting, which is of Passe performing a tonsillectomy.

To understand the fascination that such studies evince - more, say, than might be the case if she had painted motor mechanics in a car factory, or forgers in a steelyard - we might need to ask ourselves what it is about surgeons that attracts us.

In 1926, Ubaldo Oppi (1889-1942), one of the founder members of the other 1922 club (that of artists; Novecento Italiano), painted a hugely important canvas of three surgeons standing in front of an arcade in silent converse. It is still to be seen in Vicenza, where he had moved as a young man from Bologna, and is one of the most brilliant examples of stark linearity and cold, precise detail.

It has been suggested that Oppi, who ensured that his work was widely seen outside Italy (so that Hepworth could have known of it), was probably influenced by the Viennese artist Max Oppenheimer's 1912 canvas Operation, which had been painted while Oppi was living in Vienna. But the round arches of the colonnade behind the three surgeons, one of whom smokes, suggest Piero della Francesca, and the subject owes much to the image of the Trinity icon.

I mention Oppi, as this helps us to realise that surgeons are as gods, knowing good and evil and able to bring life and cause death. Oppi shows that even in their intercourse they discuss and debate our lives. Our fascination, and Hepworth's, with them is because this activity brings them centre stage, long before they don the white robe of their priesthood to perform sacrifices.

In a later lecture about her works, Hepworth remarked of two from 1949, showing the Smith-Petersen pin, "In this operation I was more aware of the figure of the patient - the whole thing had a feeling of magic about it." Of the theatre sister, in her 1948 oil and pencil drawing Trio or The Conclusion, she spoke of her as the "continuously alert helper" behind the surgeon, and she draws her in a distinctly diaconal role. The attendant figures of theatre sisters in another put Herbert Read in mind of a Greek Chorus. To labour the point, drama was for the Greeks an essential part of their worshipping life performed in front of an altar.

The sculptor, too, is a co-creator, like a surgeon, binding and loosing, and bringing substance and form together in his or her hands. In one lecture, Capener encouraged his own students to study their own hands during operations to see how they work.

The Secretary of State for Health might like to look at his own hands to see if the arsenious course on which he seems intent in the vainglorious worship of the god Austerity is leaving telltale traces on them.

"Barbara Hepworth: The Hospital Drawings" is at The Hepworth Wakefield, Gallery Walk, Wakefield, until Sunday. Phone 01924 247360

www.hepworthwakefield.org

It will be at Pallant House Gallery, 9 North Pallant, Chichester, from 16 February until 2 June. Phone 01243 774557. www.pallant.org.uk

It transfers to Mascalls Gallery, Maidstone Road, Paddock Wood, Kent, on 14 June, and runs there until 24 August. Phone 01892 839039. www.mascallsgallery.org.