Francine Mary Netter - Medicines Michelangelo : the life & art of Frank H. Netter, MD

Frank Netter was the quintessential New Yorker. He knew his way around among the skyscrapers and the parks and the historic sites. Give him a street address and he could tell you the cross street and how best to get there, and he could generally recommend a nice place in the vicinity to have lunch.

He stood 5 feet 10 inches tall, at least he had in his younger days, and maintained a trim figure. His hair, black with just a touch of gray at the temples, he wore parted in the center and combed back in waves off his face. With dark eyes, olive skin and aquiline nose, he was a handsome man. If you had seen him walking down Fifth Avenue in his camel-colored cashmere overcoat and tan felt fedora in the winter, you might have taken him for a stockbroker or a lawyer or even the physician he was. But underneath that conservative, citified exterior he favored a dashing, debonair, sometimes outlandish style befitting the artist.

Therein lies the conundrum, for he was both physician and artist. The doctors consider me an artist, and the artists consider me a doctor. I am kind of in the territory between the two, he told his young colleague Dr. Frederick Kaplan.

On the top floor of the mansion where we lived when I was a child, Daddy had a large art studio where he spent his days and nights making pictures. I remember him working long hours in his studio and emerging with a shadow of a beard, which scratched when he kissed me. If you had asked me then, I would have told you that Daddy spent all his time painting. But I can now tell you with certainty that that was not the case. For each picture he made, and he made over 4000 of them for Ciba Pharmaceuticals alone, he spent most of his time studying, thinking and planning.

With some frequency I used to go up to the studio to see him, to watch him draw and paint and simply to be with him. Daddy would tell me about the medicine in the picture he was making at the time. If he made a picture of the heart, he explained to me how it worked to circulate the blood. If it was a picture of the intestines, he taught me about digestion. He never held anything back because of my young age. The pictures told the story and made it all clear to me. We talked about all the various things that fathers and daughters discuss, and I learned much about my father, and a great deal about art and medicine.