Medical Artist

The biggest of the ten important U. S. publishers of medical books, W. B. Saunders Co.* of Philadelphia, last week celebrated its 50th birthday. Although handsome President Lawrence Saunders might have saluted himself for his formidable list of 800 medical texts ranging from the late Physiologist Hobart Amory Hare's Essentials of Physiology (published in 1888) to Dr. Leon Herman's The Practice of Urology (published this week), he saluted another instead: Professor Max Broedel of Johns Hopkins, the first & only professor of medical art in the world, illustrator of many Saunders books, crony of many Saunders authors.

Publisher Saunders had Artist Thomas Cromwell Corner paint a portrait of Artist Broedel wearing the sort of rumpled blue suit which Johns Hopkins medicos have seen him wear for 44 years. And at a jolly party in Philadelphia last week Mr. Saunders presented the portrait, to be hung in Johns Hopkins near the famed Sargent picture of the Four Doctors/- who organized that medical school.

Purpose of medical art is didactic, to teach medical students about healthy and unhealthy human bodies and how to operate on them. Earliest known examples of medical art are Babylonian baked clay models of the liver. Earliest known medical painting represents the birth of one of Cleopatra's babies. In the Italian Renaissance painters belonged to the Guild of Physicians & Apothecaries, because they bought supplies from drugstores. Artists thus developed friends among doctors, and had opportunity to study anatomy. Leonardo da Vinci made more than 750 anatomical sketches, was the first to depict the true position of the fetus in the womb.

Johns Hopkins' Max Broedel considers one of his finest works of art a picture of an unborn child cradled in a pelvis (see cut). Gynecologist Howard Kelly taught Artist Broedel this phase of medical art. Dr. Kelly--just turned 80 and the only survivor of the Four Doctors--attended last week's dinner. It was Dr. Kelly who got Max Broedel to leave his native Leipzig for Baltimore in 1894 to illustrate Kelly's Operative Gynecology. That and other books by Dr. Kelly and Johns Hopkins doctors kept the artist busy until 1911. Then Dr. Kelly's associate, Gynecologist Thomas Stephen Cullen, persuaded the late President Henry Walters of the Atlantic Coast Line R. R. to finance a chair of "Arts as Applied to Medicine" in Johns Hopkins. Associate Professor of Art Broedel gives a two-year course. Hardest thing to teach, says he, is "the use of highlights to represent the glistening character of fresh tissue, vessels, nerves and delicate structures of all kinds upon which, in medical drawings, so much depends." Over 100 have graduated from this course since 1913, among them his daughter, Elizabeth Broedel, who draws for the Women's Clinic of New York Hospital. Few alumni lack work, for, as Max Broedel tells all his students: "Medical progress is swift and constant, and many a subject considered a closed chapter has been opened by some discovery, thus necessitating newly illustrated books."

At last week's dinner, speakers larded their reminiscences with kindly references to "jolly Max." The little man blushed, winked, wriggled, cried out: "Why should a man be praised for having a wonderful time for the last 44 years."

* The others, in Philadelphia: Blakiston, Davis, Lea & Febiger, Lippincott; in Baltimore, Williams & Wilkins: in Manhattan, Hoeber, Appleton-Century; in St. Louis, Mosby; in Springfield, Ill., Thomas. /-Diagnostician William Osler, Surgeon William Stewart Halsted, Pathologist William Henry Welch, Gynecologist Howard Atwood Kelly.

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