Art, Medicine, and the University of Michigan

s this issue of Retrospectives goes to press, a remarkable series of portraits is being prepared for permanent display in the entrance to the University of Michigan Medical School in the Medical Sciences I building. The portraits are of Regent Zina Pitcher and the five original "Medical Department" faculty. They were painted in 1851 by Detroit artist and man-about-town, Alvah Bradish (1806-1901).

Portraitist Alvah Bradish

Bradish's first recorded contact with the University appears in 1849 when his gift "of an allegator [sic] and some of the fish of the Caribbean Sea" was acknowledged by the University Regents (Bradish was at the time traveling in Jamaica). Two years later he submitted a proposal to the Regents for a professorship in the fine arts and the development of an art museum. Shortly thereafter, when Henry Philip Tappan had assumed the presidency of the University (1852-1864), Bradish was made Professor of the Theory and Practice of the Fine Arts and given a room to display "specimens" of the arts. He later claimed that this room was the first art museum on a university campus. He also claimed that his lectures on the history of the fine arts, which commenced a few years later, were the first such university lectures in America.(2)

When Bradish's portraits of Pitcher and the five original faculty of the Medical Department were completed in 1852, their existence was recorded in an engraving prepared by John Sartain (1808-1897) of Philadelphia for the medical class of 1851-52--the first full class to graduate from the Medical Department. Regent Pitcher naturally occupied the central position in the engraving, since he, more than any one else, was responsible for the opening of the Medical Department in 1850. Surrounding him are Samuel Denton, a long-time Ann Arbor physician; chemist Silas Douglas; Abram Sager, Professor of Botany and later of the Theory and Practice of Medicine; the ambitious young surgeon Moses Gunn; and Jonathan Adams Allen, Professor of Pathology and Physiology.

The fate of the Bradish portraits after 1852 is murky at best. The engraving by Sartain, which will be hung alongside the remaining Bradish portraits in the new Medical School entrance, is the only known record of the Douglas and Allen portraits. Allen left Ann Arbor for Chicago when he was dismissed by the University in 1854, for reasons that are not entirely clear, perhaps taking his portrait with him. Douglas became immersed in a scandal over the 'defalcation` (embezzlement) of funds from the Chemical Laboratory in the 1870s. His name was eventually cleared, but he retired from the University in 1877, before the matter was resolved. Ten years after his death in 1890, there was apparently no painting of him on campus. Perhaps to remedy this, one of his students commissioned a portrait by another well-known artist, Percy Ives (1864-1928). Ives' portrait of Douglas was donated to the University in 1900 and will be mounted temporarily in the new display until the original Bradish portrait is recreated by an artist from the engraving.

The Bradish portraits of Denton and Sager passed into private hands and were given back to the University by family members in 1891 and 1892 respectively. The portrait of Pitcher probably did not go through this process, since there is no record of it being given to the University subsequently and it is listed in the oldest catalogue of the University's art collection. The history of the Gunn portrait prior to its appearance in the West Medical Building (now the Dana Building) in the early 20th century remains a mystery.

Interest in the portraits of the early medical faculty seems to have grown in the late 1880s. In 1888, the medical faculty appointed William Herdman to lead a committee charged with locating the portraits of its early faculty. This is also when the two magnificent portraits of Corydon Ford and Moses Gunn that now hang in the entrance to the Ford Auditorium in the University Hospital were painted by A.O. Ravenaugh. When the new West Medical Building was completed in 1903, the remaining Bradish portraits were hung in a room that was at one time called "the faculty room." As departments relocated, the portraits were gradually dispersed throughout the new University of Michigan Medical Center.

In the process of moving from place to place, the Sager and Pitcher portraits were confused, Pitcher ending up in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology identified as Sager, and Sager hanging in the Medical School Dean's conference room for many years identified as Pitcher. The fact that four of the six Bradish portraits are today not only identified and preserved but also restored is due to the loving and professional attention of Gerald Hodge, long-time head of Medical Illustration; Anita Burck, Senior Graphic Artist in the Department of Surgery; and artist/art conservator Emil Weddige.

The Art/Medicine Link

There have also been remarkable artists among the health scientists at Michigan, such as physiologist Warren P. Lombard, who late in life took up painting and etching. His etchings were widely exhibited during his lifetime, and many are still preserved in the Museum of Art. One of his most celebrated pieces, "The Veteran," was sketched on a trip to Point Lobos, California in 1927. Medical historian and fellow physiologist, Horace Davenport, writes that "for Lombard, etching was like his work in the physiology laboratory; it required patience, perseverance, innate manual dexterity, and the same training a scientist requires.(3)

Retired Professor of Dentistry, Albert G. Richards, has explored another form of artistic expression during his long career at Michigan. In the 1960s, an early interest in photography combined with his professional work in radiology to turn Richards into one of a handful of people interested in the artistic qualities of radiographs (the x-ray equivalent of photographic prints). Over the next twenty years he produced a series of remarkable radiographs of flowers, which have recently been published in The Secret Garden. (4)

Since the time of World War I, the Medical Center has hired many accomplished artists as medical illustrators. Over the years, they have captured the details, accurately illustrated and beautifully presented, of both routine procedures and pioneering work, such as Cameron Haight's first lung removal. Under the leadership of Gerald Hodge, medical illustration developed into a graduate degree program at the University of Michigan (1964) and eventually became one of the leading medical illustration programs in the U.S. and Canada today.

The history of the health sciences was also the subject of a unique artistic venture jointly undertaken by the Michigan-based pharmaceutical company, Parke-Davis & Co., and Michigan artist, Robert Thom (1915-1980). Beginning in 1949, Thom produced a series of 40 paintings depicting the history of pharmacy,(5) and followed these in 1956 with a series of 30 paintings illustrating the history of medicine.(6) Working closely with a team of scholars, Thom visited many of the sites of major events to add to the historical accuracy of his paintings. The Historical Center is currently seeking ways to mount a display on the medical campus of this unique contribution to the history of the health sciences.

The ties that have drawn the arts and the health sciences together over the years have been many. Medicine and health care are arts as well as sciences. The illustrative arts and some aspects of health care rest on unique manipulative skills. They also evoke emotions--of wonderment or awe as to the complexity of the human body and of sympathetic understanding for the successes and failures in treating human disease. That health care professionals have patronized the arts, been artists, and the subject of art, should come as no surprise. The Bradish chapter in the history of the arts and the health sciences at Michigan is just the beginning of a longer history that the Historical Center hopes to write or encourage others to write in the years ahead.

-Nicholas H. Steneck Director

Sources

1. "Alvah Bradish," Detroit News (April 20, 1901) and Detroit Free Press (April 20, 1901).

2. Alvah Bradish, Memoir of Douglass Houghton, First Geologist of Michigan<;em> (Detroit: Raynor & Taylor, 1889).

3. Horace Davenport, "A University of Michigan Faculty Life: Warren Plimpton Lombard in Ann Arbor, 1892-1939," unpublished manuscript.

4. Albert G. Richards, The Secret Garden: 100 Floral Radiographs (Ann Arbor, MI: Almar Co., 1990).

5. A History of Pharmacy in Pictures (Detroit: Parke-Davis & Co., n.d.).

6. George A. Bender and Robert A. Thom, Great Moments in Medicine: A History of Medicine in Pictures (Detroit: Parke-Davis & Co., 1961).

Radiograph reprinted with permission of Albert G. Richards

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