From Carbon to Silicon: Max Brödel at Johns Hopkins

In 1911, the establishment of the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine, the first of its kind in the world, signified the dawn of a new profession. In 2011, Johns Hopkins celebrated the evolution of the profession and the rich legacy of one hundred years of teaching excellence in medical illustration. Today, 106 years later, science and medicine as well as medical illustration have advanced. Artists’ tools have evolved from carbon to silicon. However, to communicate these advancements the guiding principles of observation and the approaches to visual problem solving remain the same.

Medical Illustration actually began at Johns Hopkins in 1894 when Max Brödel, a young artist, arrived from Leipzig, Germany. He trained as a classical artist at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. While illustrating for Dr. Carl Ludwig at the Institute of Physiology during the summers, Brödel met Drs. Franklin P. Mall and Howard A. Kelly who urged him to join them at the new Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Upon Dr. Kelley’s retirement, Dr. Thomas Cullen conceived the idea of a department. Henry Walters, a Baltimore philanthropist, agreed to endow the Department with Max as its Director. Brödel stressed preparation before beginning to draw, “The planning of the picture therefore is the all-important thing not the execution.”

The medical illustration program and its curriculum, with all of the communication components and continually evolving production technologies, remains a vital discipline today at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution.

PRESENTED BY
Gary Lees | Professor & Director Emeritus Department of Art as Applied to Medicine Archivist of the Max Brödel Archives