BRöDEL, MAX

(b. Leipzig. Germany. 8 June 1870; J. Baltimore, Maryland. b.26 October 1941)

medical illustration, anatomy.

Brödel was the son of Louis BrÖdel and Henrietta Frenzel. He attended public schools in Leipzig and studied from 1885 to 1890 at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts. During vacations he worked at the Leipzig Anatomical Institute for His, C. W. Braune, and Werner Spalteholz and later at the Leipzig Physiological Institute for Carl Ludwig and his pupils. There he met Franklin P. Mall and William H. Welch, professors at Johns Hopkins. After fulfilling his military service obligation (1890–1892), Brödel worked in Leipzig as a freelance anatomical and physiological illustrator.

At Johns Hopkins he started work in 1894 with Howard A. Kelly, professor of gynecology, at the university’s hospital. The association with Johns Hopkins continued for the rest of his career. In 1910, at the instigation of Brodel’s friend and collaborator, Thomas S. Cullen. and with the benefaction of Henry Walters (the founder of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore), the department of art as applied to medicine was established for BrÖdel at Johns Hopkins.

Brödel revolutionized medical illustration by his contributions and also taught a group of leading artists who have continued his work. Brödel was an accomplished pianist and, with Henry L. Mencken, a member of the famous Saturday Night Club.

In 1902, he married Ruth Huntingdon, of Sandusky, Ohio, a biomedical artist who graduated from Smith College. They had four children.

Close attention to anatomic detail was the essence of his method. He wrote: “The artist must first fully comprehend the subject matter from every standpoint; anatomical, topographical, histological, pathological, medical and surgical. . . . A clear and vivid picture always must precede the actual picture on paper. The planning of the picture, therefore, is the all important thing, not the execution” (“Remarks . . .,”71).

Brödel became an expert anatomist. Dissections of the kidney and vascular injections led Brödel to point out a relatively avascular plane and to suggest that the kidney be opened along this line when explored for stone. He also developed a suture for attaching a prolapsed kidney. He is eponymically memorialized in Brödel’s line and Brödel’s suture.

Brödel’s best-known works included the illustrations for Howard A. Kelly’s Operative Gynecology (1898), Cullen’s Cancer of the Uterus (1900) and some for Atlas of Human Anatomy (1935). Among his nonmedical illustrations are two famous cartoons: “The Welch Rabbits,” showing William H. (“Popsy”) Welch standing with cigar in one hand and reins leading to his students, pictured as rabbits, in the other; and “The St. John’s Hopkins Hospital,” in which William Osler, adorned with halo and wings, is above the Johns Hopkins Hospital dome.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles by Brödel are “Medical Illustration,” in Journal of the American Medical Association, 117 (1941), 668–672; and “Remarks at Testimonial Dinner to Howard Atwood Kelly on his Seventy-fifth Birthday,” in Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital,53 (1933), 71.

Secondary literature includes T. S. Cullen, “Max Brödel,” in Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. 33 (1945), 5–29; V. A. McKusick, “Brödel’s Ulnar Palsy, With Unpublished Brddel Sketches,” in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 23 (1949), 469–479; and Judith Robinson, Tom Cullen of Baltimore (London-New York, 1949).

Victor A. McKusick