Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519

Painter, architect, inventor, quintessential “renaissance man” Leonardo da Vinci very well might have had “medical illustrator” added to the long list of titles that described him if such a term existed 500 years ago. Though da Vinci’s beautiful and most often quite accurate anatomic studies of dissected cadavers were created to satisfy his insatiable curiosity and not for the dissemination of knowledge per se, da Vinci is nonetheless considered the grandfather and patron spirt of contemporary medical and scientific illustrators.

Andreas Vesalius 1514-1564, Jan Stephen van Calcar (?)

Flemish Anatomist, Physician and Author Vesalius was not an illustrator, but his seminal work, De Humani Corpus Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) revolutionized and modernized anatomic understanding. Prior to its publishing in 1543, the first century texts of Aelius Galenus (Galen) were still judged as authoritative. Unfortunately the identity of the artist and collaborator of this great work is lost to history, though there is speculation that it was Jan Steven van Calcar, a Flemish painter and student of Titian in Venice that was responsible for the spectacular wood engravings contained within. Still, Fabrica is considered a masterpiece and landmark in the history of western medical illustration and eduction.

Max Brödel 1870-1941

There is no human more responsible for the establishment of medical illustration as a profession than Max Brödel. A veritable artistic and musical genius, Brödel graduated from the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig Germany at the age of 18 and began working for renown Physiologist Carl Ludwig. Working with Ludwig, Brödel gained basic medical knowledge and received high praise for his meticulous medical illustrations, a skill in which he was completely self-taught. In 1888, while still in Germany, Brödel met Dr. Franklin P. Mall of Johns Hopkins Hospital, and in 1894 he accepted Mall’s invitation to join the fledging hospital in Baltimore. Soon after arrival, Brödel began working with surgeon Howard Kelly as the illustrator of Operative Gynecology, a landmark textbook in the field, and eventually collaborates with Hopkins’ luminaries William S. Halstead and Thomas S. Cullen, among others.

In 1910 Brödel was recruited to join the Mayo Clinic, but in response friend and colleague Cullen led a fund raising effort to retain Brödel and launch a training program for future medical illustrators. Henry Walters, A Baltimore financier, philanthropist and art collector agreed to fund the new department and school, thus in 1911 the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at Johns Hopkins was created with Brödel as Director, graduating its first student, Ruth Huntington, a year later. In 1961, 20 years after Brödel’s death, for the first time graduates of the program received a Master of Arts in Medical and Biological Illustration degree, the first such academic credentials in medical illustration in North America. Today Art as Applied to Medicine continues to train medical illustrators, with up to seven new practitioners graduating each year.

Brödel’s role in the establishment of medical illustration as a profession cannot be overstated, just as his skill with the traditional medias of pen and ink and carbon dust (an invention of his) be matched. Beyond his mastery of traditional media however, Brödel’s legacy lives in his philosophy that the “story” inherent in the illustration (how successfully it delivers the intended information) is of primary importance, and his insistence that illustrators know as much about the subject as possible in order to illustrate it successfully.

Today

Following in Brödel’s footsteps, a handful of notable graduates of Art as Applied to Medicine subsequently established other highly respected graduate degree programs, further enhancing his legacy. Currently there are five accredited master’s programs in the U.S., and one in Canada, plus a small number of undergraduate programs offering medical illustration or pre-medical illustration degrees. Today the term “biomedical visualization” is frequently used to describe the profession, to reflect the broad areas of medicine and science in which we work, but the roots are still medical illustration.

Since the digital revolution of the 1980’s most contemporary medical and scientific illustrators work in digital media rather than in traditional, but the goal is the same; to deliver information in visual form as efficiently and authoritatively as possible. There is little doubt that Leonardo da Vinci or Max Brödel would marvel at today’s technology related to medical illustration, but given the opportunity, they would have mastered it completely.