Medical Art

For those who could stomach it, there was a wonderful medical-art show on view last week in Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. Its 162 meticulous, gruesome pictures represented the work of about half of the nation's 50 professional medical artists. There was a portrait of an 89-pound tumor shortly after removal, a thorax without any viscera, a woman being skin-grafted after removal of her breast.

Many of the pictures will travel to other cities. The magazine Modern Medicine, which collected the show, chose Baltimore as an early stop because most top medical artists stem from a Baltimore school. They are pupils of the late great Max Broedel (TIME, March 14, 1938), who for 29 years occupied Johns Hopkins' chair of Arts as Applied to Medicine.

Max Broedel was brought to the U.S. in 1894 (by Dr. Howard A. Kelly of the Hopkins Big Four) to illustrate medical and surgical texts by Hopkins writers. He practiced and taught a kind of work that color photography has never been able to supplant. An artist with a firsthand knowledge of anatomy can paint the steps of an operation without any confusing detail, leaving out the blood, swabs and the forest of clamps which clutter a photograph.

Scalpel and Torso. Broedel taught his students as he had been taught in Germany. James F. Didusch, who succeeded him at Hopkins, was his first pupil. On the first day, Broedel gave Didusch a scalpel and the torso of a woman, told him to begin dissecting, drawing each layer as he came to it. Didusch still remembers how surprisingly tough the skin was. Next day a girl joined the class. "Here," said Broedel, "let [her] have half the corpse."

Other Broedel pupils represented in the show are Hopkins' Ranice W. Birch and Annette Burgess, Mayo Clinic's Russell Drake, Yale's Armin Hemberger. Their pictures clearly demonstrate that a good medical artist takes pleasure in beauty as well as scientific exactness. Most delicate are Miss Burgess' paintings of the tissue at the back of the eye, with each vein in glowing color. There is also a careful picture of a seven-and-a-half-day-old human embryo magnified 500 times (see cut), which James Didusch took two months to draw.

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