Kahlo split her own torso open in the painting and replaced her spinal column with a shattered classical column, its stone visibly crumbling and cracked along the break. Nails puncture her skin across her torso and, on the right side only, down her leg, a detail that ties back to childhood polio rather than to the 1925 accident, since that leg had already been left thinner and weaker before the crash^[2]. She originally painted the whole figure nude and added the draped cloth over her lower body afterward, a addition read as a deliberate echo of the shroud draped over Christ's body, reinforcing a set of religious suffering references that recur across the picture, from the tears reminiscent of the mater dolorosa to the nails standing in for instruments of martyrdom^[2].

The painting is routinely read as a direct record of the 1925 bus and tram collision, even though Kahlo made it nearly two decades after the crash itself. That collision impaled her on a metal handrail that entered her lower torso and exited through her vagina, fracturing her spine and pelvis, cracking several ribs and her collarbone, crushing her foot, and further damaging a right leg already weakened by polio^[1]. She spent close to a year recovering enough to walk again, and doctors later concluded her misshapen pelvis made carrying a pregnancy to term extremely difficult, a judgment that shaped two further miscarriages and two medically advised abortions over the years that followed^[1]. The Broken Column arrived not at the start of this history but well into it, made after acute back pain in 1944 and a spinal operation that left her needing the steel corset shown in the painting on a permanent basis^[1].

Some readings of the painting stop at physical pain: a woman's body literally broken, held together by medicine rather than by its own strength. Others push the metaphor further. One prominent interpretation describes the column as thrusting cruelly into the body from groin to head and reads the image as reaching toward a metaphor for sexual violation, tying the picture's imagery directly back to the metal rod that had pierced Kahlo's vagina during the original accident^[2]. That reading gains some support from Kahlo's own words. She once described the 1925 crash, without elaboration, as the moment she lost her virginity, a comment that later writers have taken as licence to read sexual violation into the painting's imagery rather than treating the crash and the picture as records of physical injury alone^[2].