On September 17, 1925, 18-year-old Frida Kahlo was nearly killed when the bus she was riding collided with an electric trolley car in Mexico City. The crash left her with devastating injuries that would shape the rest of her life, ending her plans to become a doctor and setting her on the path to becoming one of the most celebrated painters of the 20th century.
The Collision
Kahlo had spent the day attending classes at the National Preparatory School, where she was studying with the goal of eventually entering medical school. That afternoon, she and her boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias, boarded a wooden-benched bus heading toward her home neighborhood of Coyoacan. Minutes after they sat down, the bus turned a corner and was struck by an electric trolley car traveling at full speed.
The impact was catastrophic. Gomez Arias walked away with minor injuries, but Kahlo’s body absorbed the worst of the wreck. An iron handrail from the bus broke free and pierced her abdomen, entering through her left hip and exiting through her vagina. Doctors at the Red Cross Hospital initially doubted she would survive. Gomez Arias reportedly had to convince the medical team to keep treating her, and his persistence may have saved her life.
The Full Scope of Her Injuries
Beyond the impalement wound, the collision fractured Kahlo’s body in ways that would never fully heal. She suffered fractures to her spinal column, collarbone, pelvis, and her right leg and foot. Her left elbow was dislocated. The iron handrail that passed through her abdomen damaged her uterus and other pelvic organs.
The spinal injuries were especially debilitating. Vertebral fractures went undiagnosed at first, only discovered later when persistent back pain prompted further examination. From that point on, Kahlo wore a series of plaster and metal corsets designed to support her spine. At one point during her recovery, she spent three months suspended in a nearly vertical position with sandbags attached to her feet to straighten her spinal column. She was only 18 years old.
How the Accident Ended Her Medical Career
Before the crash, Kahlo was one of only 35 female students admitted to the National Preparatory School, Mexico’s most prestigious institution. She was bright, ambitious, and focused on becoming a physician. The months of immobilization and the chronic pain that followed made returning to that path impossible. She never went back to medical school.
How Painting Began
Confined to bed in a full-body plaster cast, Kahlo was desperately bored. She later described the decision to start painting in characteristically blunt terms: “I was terribly bored there in bed in a plaster cast, so I decided to do something. I stole some oil paints from my father, and my mother had a special easel made for me since I couldn’t sit up. That’s how I began to paint.”
Her mother attached a mirror to the canopy above her bed so Kahlo could see herself while lying flat. This simple setup explains one of the most defining features of her career: the self-portrait. Her own face and body were the most available subjects, and she painted them obsessively. In 1926, still recovering, she completed her first self-portrait, “Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress,” a work influenced by Renaissance painting styles. It was the beginning of a body of work that would eventually include 55 self-portraits out of roughly 200 total paintings.
Lifelong Consequences of the Crash
The 1925 accident was not something Kahlo recovered from and moved past. It defined the physical reality of her remaining 29 years. She lived with chronic pain in her back, leg, and foot for the rest of her life, undergoing more than 30 surgeries. The plaster and metal corsets she wore to stabilize her spine became part of her daily existence, and she eventually decorated them with paint, turning medical devices into art objects.
The damage to her uterus and pelvis left her unable to carry a pregnancy to term. Over the course of her life, she experienced multiple miscarriages and at least three therapeutic abortions when pregnancies threatened her health. The grief of infertility became one of the most powerful themes in her art, producing works that shocked her contemporaries with their raw honesty about the female body, loss, and physical suffering.
Kahlo also struggled with depression, compounded by chronic pain and a turbulent marriage to muralist Diego Rivera. Pain, both physical and emotional, became inseparable from her creative output. Many of her most iconic paintings depict her body broken, pierced, or restrained, direct visual echoes of what happened on that bus in September 1925. The accident destroyed the life she had planned and, in the process, created one of the most distinctive artistic voices of the century.