Max Brödel, of the Johns Hopkins Hospital
and Medical School, was perhaps the
founder of modern medical illustration. A German by
birth, a Hopkins professor lured him as a young man in 1894 to that new
hospital and medical school in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.; by the early
twentieth century, he was the first professor of art as applied to medicine
in the first department of that
specialty in the world, created because Dr. William J. Mayo of the new Mayo Clinic was tempting him with
a fat job, and Hopkins wanted to keep him. The donor of the money used to
create the new department was Henry Walters (interestingly,
medical courses he took at Harvard made him sick), a wealthy Baltimorean,
whose eponymous gallery showed a selection of Brödel's work in April
1997.
Here are two of his probably thousands of
drawings and paintings; see also his pessary
elswhere. The drawing right below is Muscles of the Pelvic Floor in Relation
to Rectal and Vaginal Openings from the 1928 edition of Howard Kelly's Gynecology.
Dr. Kelly was the first professor of gynecology at Johns Hopkins.
As an artist myself, I think
Brödel's pen-and-ink drawings are his best, requiring real thought
in selection of lines. This drawing is Method of Introducing Long Rectal
Speculum to Examine Entire Length of Lower Bowel, from the same volume as
above. The doctor looks a lot like Dr. Kelly, and probably is. Dr. Kelly
is one of the four Hopkins doctors in the famous painting by John Singer
Sargent; much in modern medicine started with them.
By the way, the "woman"
in the awkward position in this drawing is undoubtedly none other than the
good-humored Dr. Thomas Cullen, second professor of gynecology at Johns
Hopkins! Because of mores, Brödel had trouble finding living female
models, although he had plenty of autopsy specimens to draw from. According
to Ranice W. Crosby and John Cody, authors of Max Brödel, The Man Who
Put Art Into Medicine (Springer-Verlag, 1991), Cullen volunteered to pose
nude, and the artist added something here and took away something there
to create a woman. Cullen later liked to show people the drawing and ask
them who they thought the model was; he loved telling them the answer!
The"woman" on the table is black,
and blacks sometimes appear in illustrations in this standard text. The
text calls them Negresses. Modern gynecology is often said to start with
the work of Dr. Marion Sims in the middle of the last century. He's best
remembered for developing a successful operation for repairing severe injuries
caused by childbirth, and he developed the operation using American slaves.
© 1998 Harry Finley. It is illegal to
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