Quinnipiac University’s medical school will be named after Dr. Frank Netter, a surgeon and prolific medical illustrator whose work has long been used in medical education, the school announced this week.

The Frank H. Netter, M.D., School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University is scheduled to open in the fall of 2013. The naming is the result of a major gift from Barbara Netter and her late husband, Edward, Frank Netter’s first cousin.

Frank Netter, known as “medicine’s Michelangelo,” began making illustrations of the major organs in the 1930s, ultimately creating thousands of images of human anatomy, diseases and medical procedures.

In 1988, when Netter was 82, The New York Times described him as “an artist who has probably contributed more to medical education than most of the world’s anatomy professors taken together.”

“As a medical illustrator, Dr. Netter provided generations of students with scientific and medical information that was simply not available before his works were widely published,” Dr. Bruce Koeppen, founding dean of the medical school, said in a statement. “This is certainly a most appropriate and fitting name for our School of Medicine.”

The university is seeking accreditation for the medical school and hopes to have preliminary accreditation next year, Koeppen said.

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Arielle Levin Becker covered health care for The Connecticut Mirror. She previously worked for The Hartford Courant, most recently as its health reporter, and has also covered small towns, courts and education in Connecticut and New Jersey. She was a finalist in 2009 for the prestigious Livingston Award for Young Journalists, a recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship and the third-place winner in 2013 for an in-depth piece on caregivers from the National Association of Health Journalists. She is a 2004 graduate of Yale University.

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