His interest in medical photographs led him to produce more than 24 articles on the value of images in the diagnosis of a number of diseases.

In 1970, a faculty position at Piedmont Hospital was created for him by Hurst, and Silverman subsequently established its first cardiology program.

In between his junior and senior years at medical school, during one summer, he attended Guy's Hospital in London, where he became interested in both clinical signs and the history of medicine.

Here, he was inspired to pursue a career in the specialty of cardiology by cardiac catheterisation pioneer James V. Warren and academic cardiologist John Willis Hurst, who was a visiting professor at Ohio State and the chief of medicine at Emory University in Atlanta.

[2] Silverman became interested in medical photography and produced a collection which drove him to publish more than 24 articles on the value of images in the diagnosis of a number of diseases.

[3] He begins with a quote from Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887): Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs.

[1] Subsequently, Silverman co-authored a section on inspection in the second edition (1970) of Hurst's classic cardiology textbook The Heart.

He remained affiliated with the Emory for the rest of his medical career, teaching students, nurses and residents.

He was an advocate of preventive medicine and founded the Nicholas E. Davies Community Health Information Center, one of America's first libraries for patient education.

[2] In 1998, Silverman became an academic fellow at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, where he spent six months researching and writing a book titled British Cardiology in the 20th Century, for which he was awarded a fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians.

These included papers on British cardiologists, such as Paul Wood, inspired by his time at the Wellcome in London.

[2] The Mark E. Silverman Endowed Chair in Cardiology and Education was established in his name, and a tribute is held at Piedmont Heart every year.