Background

Max Brodel was born on June 8, 1870 in Leipzig, Germany, the second of three children and only son of Louis Brodel, a manager in the Steinweg piano works, and Henrietta (Frenzel) Brodel.

Education

Max attended local public schools, spent a year (1884 - 85) at the Technical High School, studied at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts (1885 - 90), and served for two years (1890 - 92) in the German army.

Career

Max Brodel obtained part-time jobs drawing illustrations for the medical research being carried out at the University of Leipzig in order to earn money during his years at the academy. While working for the physiologist Karl Ludwig, he met two members of the Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty, the anatomist Franklin P. Mall and the pathologist William H. Welch. Mall, impressed with Brodel's skill at portraying clinical material, was instrumental in bringing him to the United States, in January 1894, to make drawings of operative procedures and pathological specimens for the Hopkins gynecologist Howard A. Kelly.

At Johns Hopkins, Brodel, feeling handicapped by his lack of medical knowledge, studied anatomy and physiology and learned to make his own dissections. His clear and informative illustrations for Kelly's Operative Gynecology (1898) and Thomas S. Cullen's Cancer of the Uterus (1900) brought him recognition as the foremost medical artist in the United States.

In 1909 he was appointed an honorary member of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, the only non-physician ever to receive such a privilege.

In 1911, through the efforts of Dr. Cullen and with the financial support of the Baltimore philanthropist Henry Walters, a "Department of Art as Applied to Medicine" was established at Johns Hopkins.

Later in life he had a serious infection of his left arm and hand, which he received in 1899 while dissecting autopsied material, resulted in damage to the ulnar nerve.

Brodel died in Baltimore at the age of seventy of metastatic cancer of the pancreas, a few days after an operation.

Achievements

• Max Brodel main achievement was in revolutionizing of medical illustration and in teaching a group of leading artists who have continued his work. When Brodel began his career, most medical publications were illustrated by relatively poor drawings made by draftsmen who lacked training in either medicine or art. Brodel based his work on close attention to anatomic detail. He insisted on seeing for himself the organ or process to be shown and gaining a thorough understanding of the clinical phenomena involved. The resulting drawings constituted a positive addition to medical knowledge. He was also a founder (1910) and a leading figure of Baltimore's Saturday Night Club along with the author Henry L. Mencken. In the years prior to his retirement in 1940 Brodel was appointed director, with the rank of associate professor of Johns Hopkins Medical School, and his department trained over 200 medical artists from throughout the United States and Canada.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Atlas of Human Anatomy Revised

    (Atlas of Human Anatomy Revised Like New. Some page yellow...)

  • Three Unpublished Drawings of the Anatomy of the Human Ear

    (Max Brodel was born in 1941. During his lifetime he revol...)

  • Atlas of Human Anatomy with Explanatory Text

    (anatomy book)

  • Atlas of Human Anatomy
  • Atlas of Human Anatomy (revised and enlarged) Fifth Edition
  • Atlas of Human Anatomy - Printed in Eight Colors - 71 Accurate and Vivid Illustrations
  • Myomata of the Uterus by Cullen, Thomas Stephen, Kelly, Howard Atwood published by Nabu Press (2010) Paperback

Religion

In his religious affiliation Max Brodel was an Evangelical Lutheran.

Views

His goal was to train medical illustrators to work in conjunction with physicians to increase understanding of how the body works. The program was the first of its kind, and attracted both medical and art students from all around the world.

He used the misfortune to discover more about the anatomy involved; in a set of meticulous drawings he mapped the areas of numbness in his arms and traced the later recovery of sensation. In another investigation, to determine the blood supply of the kidney, he delineated an area relatively free of blood vessels and suggested that in operations for kidney stone the incision be made along this line (now known as Brödel's line).

He also devised a suture to repair a prolapsed kidney (now known as Brödel's suture).

Quotations: "A clear and vivid [mental] picture, " he wrote, "always must precede the actual picture on paper. The planning of the picture, therefore, is the all-important thing, not the execution. "

Membership

Brodel was a member of the Association of Medical Illustrators, which began in 1945.

Personality

Brodel had a warm personality that brought him many friends. He was a regular at the Saturday Night Club, where he frequented to drink and enjoy himself.

Interests

• Perhaps Brodel's chief pleasure, aside from medical illustration, was playing the piano. An accomplished performer, he had begun studying at the age of six, and music, particularly that of Beethoven, remained a lifelong passion.
  
  During summer vacations at Ahmic Lake in Ontario Brodel liked to relax by hunting, fishing, collecting fungi, and painting landscapes. His nonmedical sketching included the design of bookplates for several of his friends and a famous cartoon, "The St. John's Hopkins Hospital, " showing William Osler, wearing halo and wings, rising above the Johns Hopkins Hospital dome while various germs flee below.

Connections

On December 31, 1902, Brodel married Ruth Marian Huntington of Sandusky, Ohio, a biomedical artist who shared his delight in music. They had four children together: Elizabeth (born October 9, 1903), Ruth (born April 23, 1905), Carl (born June 7, 1908), and Elsa (born February 8, 1911).

Ruth suffered from scarlet fever as a child and died on June 1, 1908. Elizabeth later followed her father's foosteps and became a medical illustrator.

Father:

Louis Brodel

Mother:

Henrietta (Frenzel) Brodel

collaborator:

Henry L. Mencken

author

Son:

Carl Brodel

Wife:

Ruth Marian Huntington

Daughter:

Ruth Brodel

Daughter:

Elizabeth Brodel

Daughter:

Elsa Brodel

colleague:

William H. Welch

pathologist

colleague:

Franklin P. Mal

anatomist

Friend:

H.L. Mencken

Friend:

Dr. Thomas S. Cullen

Gynecologist and close friend of Brodel, Dr. Thomas S. Cullen, began raising funds for a department where Brodel could remain content at Johns Hopkins.

References

• Max Brödel: The Man Who Put Art Into Medicine