Henry Jacob Bigelow Watercolor Collection, 1848-1854. WAM 21142.075—

Henry Jacob Bigelow Watercolor Collection, 1848-1854. WAM 21142.075—

Bigelow, Henry Jacob, 1818-1890

Wallis, Oscar

Teaching—Aids and devices

Henry Jacob Bigelow was born 11 March 1818, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Jacob Bigelow (1787-1879), was a well-known medical practitioner in the city. Bigelow attended Harvard College, entering at the age of fifteen in 1833, and graduated with a B.A. in 1837. Afterwards, he began studying medicine with his father and attended lectures at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, given by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894). Bigelow was appointed a house surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston in 1838 and held the post for a year. He traveled to Cuba in the early 1840s and returned to Boston to take his medical degree in 1841. After completing his M.D., Bigelow traveled to Europe, studying medicine in Paris and London until his return to Boston in 1844 to take up medical practice. In the same year, he wrote the Boylston Prize-winning essay on that year’s topic of the relief of deformity and lameness by muscle division. In 1845, he was elected president of the Boylston Society and in 1846, appointed Visiting Surgeon in the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1849, Bigelow was appointed as Professor of Surgery at the Harvard Medical School. Bigelow was a pathologist by training, but was active in a variety of other fields, including the popularizing of anesthesia by ether, revising the equipment and technique for lithotrity, and working with the anti-vivisection movement. He was a supporter of the claim of William Morton as the discoverer of anesthetic ether and wrote widely on the subject; Bigelow also favored the immediate adoption of ether anesthetic in surgical operations, claiming to have been responsible for one of the first uses of the discovery in surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Bigelow worked with artist Oscar Wallis on a detailed series of medical illustrations of tumors and other specimens viewed under the
microscope. Other drawings on which Bigelow and Wallis collaborated were used in Bigelow's published works or as teaching tools, but the drawings in this collection were mostly intended for a work which was never published. Henry Jacob Bigelow died in 1890 at his home in Newton, Massachusetts, several months after a severe fall.

Oscar Wallis was an artist primarily known for his 1848-1854 collaboration with Henry Jacob Bigelow for a set of teaching watercolors. Wallis also illustrated a volume on pathology written by Bigelow, although this volume was never published. Wallis also contributed lithographic work to Benjamin Champney's "New England Scenery" (1852) and George Bond's "Map of the White Mountains" (1853).

This collection is comprised of the set of watercolor illustrations that Henry Jacob Bigelow employed artist Oscar Wallis to paint from 1848-1854. Bigelow commissioned these large watercolors of anatomical subjects to illustrate his lectures at Harvard Medical School. Wallis painted the teaching diagrams from local subjects and from the atlases of established medical authorities.

In 1890 Bigelow presented the watercolors to Reginald H. Fitz to be used in the Harvard Medical School's Department of Anatomy. The watercolors were transferred into the Warren Anatomical Museum between 1890 and 1930.