BIOGRAPHY

MICHAEL SALCMAN, physician, brain scientist, essayist on the visual arts and poet,  was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia in 1946 and came to the United States in 1949. The son of Holocaust survivors, he contracted polio in one of New York City’s last major outbreaks. He began writing poetry while a student at Midwood High School. At 16, he attended the Combined Program in Liberal Arts and Medical Education at Boston University and received both the B.A. and M.D. in 1969, graduating first in his class at age 22. After a surgical internship, he trained in neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health and did a residency in neurological surgery at Columbia University. He began his academic career at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1976 and in 1984 was appointed the youngest chairman of neurosurgery in the United States. His early medical career was profiled by Pultizer Prize-winner Jon Franklin and Alan Doelp in their book, Not Quite A Miracle (Doubleday, 1983). In the laboratory, Dr. Salcman studied the effects of microwave-induced hyperthermia on the brain and on model brain tumors; the physiology and manipulation of the blood-brain barrier with regard to drug entry; and invented chronic single-cell recording techniques for use in behaving animals and in visual physiology. His clinical research focused on diseases of the brain. He was a pioneer in the use of image-guided stereotactic surgery for the implantation of microwave antennas and radiation sources in combination with experimental chemotherapy for the treatment of malignant brain tumors. Similarly, he was one of the first to use the operating microscope and surgical laser for repeat operations for a variety of disorders. Dr. Salcman has used microsurgical techniques to  treat vascular diseases of the brain and surgical diseases of the spine.

He was named a Distinguished Alumnus of Columbia's Neurological Institute in 1985 and of Boston University's School of Medicine in 2001. In 1991 he was elected President of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. He is the author of almost 200 medical and scientific papers and the author or editor of six textbooks, most recently the two-volume 2nd edition of Kempe's Operative Neurosurgery (Springer-Verlag, 2004). His medical and scientific books have been translated into Spanish, German, Portuguese and Chinese.

He is past President of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. His art reviews and essays on the relationship between the arts and sciences & the visual arts and the brain have appeared in Urbanite, Neurosurgery, Creative Non-Fiction and on-line at sites such as www.PEEKreview.net and www.artbrain.org. Since 2001 he has taught an annual course on the History of Contemporary Art at several venues including Roland Park Country School, The Contemporary Museum and Towson University. He does studio visits, performs artist crits and has taught seminars on the brain’s visual system and art at the Cooper Union in New York and at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.  

He has been writing poetry for almost forty years. His earliest poems, some of which appeared in Menke Katz’s Bitterroot, date from 1963 through 1977. After a ten-year hiatus, he began to write again. The new poems have been widely published in such journals as The Ontario Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, Barrow Street, Southern Poetry Review, River Styx, & New York Quarterly. He is the author of three early chapbooks: Plow Into Winter (Pudding House Publications, Ohio, 2003), The Color That Advances (Camber Press, New York, 2003), and A Season Like This (Finishing Line Press, Kentucky, 2004). The Color That Advances collects poems on art and artists; the title poem was performed in Lee Boot's award-winning feature-length documentary on the brain and creativity, Euphoria (2005). Dr. Salcman has also read his work on NPR's "All Things Considered" and on WYPR's "The Signal".

The Clock Made of Confetti, his first full poetry collection, was published by Orchises Press (Washington, D.C.) in January, 2007. Stones In Our Pockets, a chapbook devoted to new poems and poems on medical subjects, is forthcoming from Parallel Press at the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the end of the year.  Currently, Dr. Salcman is working with artist Patrick Burns on Metonymy, a limited edition portfolio of copper-plate etchings and poems.

He and his wife Ilene live in Baltimore with a demanding cat and a contemporary art collection; they have two children who are presently out of the house.