Frank H. Netter

Frank Henry Netter was an American surgeon and medical illustrator who lived from 1906 to 1991. Born in Manhattan, he grew up wanting to be an artist, studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League of New York, and worked for the Saturday Evening Post and The New York Times before his family's disapproval of an artist's career led him to study medicine. He earned a degree at the City College of New York, completed medical school at New York University and a surgical internship at Bellevue Hospital, but in 1933, in the depths of the Depression, there was little medical practice to be had, so he fell back on freelance medical art, and pharmaceutical companies began commissioning illustrations from him to sell products such as Novocain. In 1936 the CIBA Pharmaceutical Company commissioned a fold-up illustration of a heart to promote digitalis, which proved hugely popular with physicians and grew into the CIBA Collection of Medical Illustrations. The first edition of his Atlas of Human Anatomy, which he called his personal Sistine Chapel, was published in 1989, and he was a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.