Doris Leavitt Appel, the sculptor and medical historian, was born on June 4, 1904 in Boston, Massachusetts. After graduating from State College, she studied art at Boston University and at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Her husband, Bernard Appel,M.D. inspired his wife, encouraged her, supported her, assisted in the casting of his wife's works, photographed portraits of her work and filmed the making of her statues.
Their partnership focused on History, Art, and Medicine and inspired Appel’s creation in sculpture of the figures whose major discoveries and insights changed the course of Western medicine.
This series of 12 figures emerging from low to high relief, as if from the past, was originally commissioned for the entrance to a Library for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington,D.C.
The Second World War and its aftermath cancelled plans for the Pathology Library and museum. Below is the "Hall of Medicine" in its original form in Lynn, Massachusetts.