The stuffed cardboard box was trying mightily to stay folded shut, but the papers inside were not cooperating. Ever curious, I wanted to see what was preventing it from lying flat and closing.
Pulling back the top flap, I came across some small prints that were not very interesting, but then the good stuff revealed itself. The first was a print of children in a hospital ward that looked to be from the 1940s or 1950s. It piqued my interest because in the center of the photo was a little African American girl playing with blocks.
She was drawn realistically, a total opposite of the grotesque images of black children in most forms of media at that time and before. She was the only black child in a room of white children, doctors and nurses.
Seeing her, I wondered if there were other prints in the lot showing African Americans as people. I found two others: One showed a soldier replacing his military uniform for a doctor’s coat while his family and a black woman washing windows looked on. I assumed that she was the maid but the family’s home looked to be too poor for them to afford a maid.
The other was a doctor delivering a baby in a black family’s home while a midwife – I assumed she was a widwife – accepted the baby, and the father and son peeped in at the door.
Who was this illustrator, I wondered, as I snapped photos of the prints.
Soon, I heard the admonishing voice of another auction-goer, a man who stood watching me. No one will buy those if you take pictures of them, he said – which didn’t make much sense to me. He continued badgering me until I asked him why he was bothering me.
“Because those are mine,” he said. Great answer, I thought; now I could pepper him with questions about where they came from. He had bought them at an auction, he said, but he was familiar with the subject. Medical laboratories would send these prints to doctors’ offices where they would be framed and hung on the walls, he said.
The return address on the cardboard box was from Abbott Laboratories to a local doctor. Each print was accompanied with a flap at the top left with the inscription “Compliments of the Armour Laboratories.”
The auction-goer went on to say that his great uncle had worked for a pharmaceutical company – not Abbott – so I assume that’s why he was familiar with these types of drawings. I told the him that I was interested in buying them (and I did buy them). The people in them were simply portrayed in their natural spaces, and each print was filled with details that evoked a wonderful story. These 10 prints were also telling because of what they did not show: women or African American doctors.
The lot also contained a series of reproductions of paintings by famous artists that were distributed to doctors by Merrill Pharmaceuticals. The images were chosen by directors at major museums across the country, according to the materials accompanying them.
F. Netter or Frank Netter was a doctor who became a famous medical illustrator of the human body, what it looks like, its ills and how we attempt to repair it. He wrote and illustrated books that can be found in major medical school libraries in this country and abroad. He illustrated the first organ transplants, the first open heart surgery and the first joint replacements.
Hanging on the wall at the auction house were two framed prints – both with water damage – of his renderings of the human nasal cavity. He had pulled back the skin and showed exactly what a surgeon saw and what most of us can live without seeing.
They reminded me of the drawings of the human muscular system from elementary health classes. I wondered if those childhood pictures were also some of his drawings.
Netter started out as a commercial artist with works in national magazines and newspapers, after having studied at schools in New York (he was born in Brooklyn in 1906). His family wanted him to be a doctor, and he gave up his artwork in the 1920s and headed to medical school. While other students wrote notes, Netter drew his, creating illustrations of what he was learning in class.
“Mine was a graphic viewpoint,” he said. “My notebooks were crammed with illustrations. It was the only way I could remember things.”
Some of his professors saw his drawings and enlisted him to illustrate their books. Instead of becoming a doctor (he had a brief stint as a surgeon), he turned to medical illustrations for pharmaceutical companies.
Netter illustrated a flyer around 1937 for the Ciba Pharmaceuticals’ heart drug digitalis, working with the company over the next 50 years. He produced the “Ciba Collection of Medical Illustrations,” among other books, that showed human anatomy and pathology. Ciba distributed free copies of Netter’s illustrations to doctors and medical students. They were so popular that doctors asked for more of the flyers without the advertising.
For the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco in 1939, he designed a 7-foot-tall transparent figure of a woman – with a recorded voice – that showed her body parts, along with the birth of a child. “We knew it was a successful model,” Dr. Netter once said, “because every 15 minutes, someone viewing the presentation fainted,” according to his 1991 obituary in the New York Times.
Netter created 4,000 drawings of the human body and more. In 1989 he wrote the book “Atlas of Human Anatomy,” which contained his best images and which he called his “Sistine Chapel.” The 13-volume Ciba Collection is used in medical schools the world over.
The medical school at Quinnipiac University in North Haven, CT, was named for him. The bio on the school’s website mentioned that his drawings were “done with a striking level of empathy and humanity” – a quality that I saw in the drawings of the little girl and the black family.
Netter died in 1991 at age 85.
Thanks for triggering an intriguing morning of memories.
Frank Netter, M.D. was first introduced in about 1947, at Davidson College, Davidson, NC, as CIBA collections.
Most of the association, however, were from Abbott Laboratories, as single sheets, later as occasional bound volumes (always blue) and/or boxed pictures of groups of students/physicians.
The special memories, however, both at Davidson College and later at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, were of Dr. Netter’s anatomic illustrations! which both CIBA and Abbott Laboratories were so generous in sharing with students and doctors. They were splendid aids in undergraduate years, stimulating interest in anatomy, then later on, as supplements to Gray’s Anatomy and companions to the Sabotta-McMurrich classic anatomic texts.
Now, as an 89 year old retired orthopedic surgeon, articles such as yours are a special companion of a different sort.
So – once again, a special thank you.
You’re very welcome. I always love turning up history. I’m so very happy the blog post rekindled some wonderful memories.