Academic Artist Frank Netter - Lymph Vessels and Nodes of Head and Neck

To generations of medical students, the name Frank Netter has been and will continue to be a magical connotation. Frank Netter is the doctor who drew the remarkably lifelike images that have been used my thousands of medical and undergraduate student to study and learn anatomy. Netter was born in Manhattan in 1906 and showed promise for art at an early age. During high school, he studied at the prestigious National Academy of Design, where he drew nude figures and eventually created artwork at New York’s City College. Despite his remarkable talent, he had promised his mother he would go to medical school, so in 1927, he enrolled at New York University Medical College. Netter did practice medicine briefly but,“the demand for Frank’s sable brush grew faster than the demand for his scalpel.” His portraits, drawings of body parts and, at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, images of new drugs and how they worked were simply too vivid and unique to ignore. In 1934, Netter saw his last patient.