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PEERING IN Dissection at the Yale School of Medicine around 1910. Such photos were popular in the 1910s and ’20s. By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D., April 27, 2009. The array of familiar objects threatened by digital technology encompasses the old (books, paintings) and the new (CDs). And then there is the human body, which counts as both.

Not the bodies we use, of course, but rather the bodies we allow medical professionals to use while training, to familiarize themselves with the terrain. Dissecting a cadaver has been part of medical education for millenniums. But the cadaver that enters the gross anatomy suite with the blessing of both the prior owner and the state is actually quite a new phenomenon.

Barely a century ago American medical schools were helping themselves to alumni of the local poorhouse for some of their teaching material and paying grave robbers for the rest. Uniformity came to the process of organ donation beginning only in 1968, with the development of a model law that states could adopt.

Now the same technology that lets us scan living bodies in all dimensions may obviate our need for dead ones, as some anatomy courses move from real dissection to its virtual counterpart — clean and odor-free, in crystal-clear focus with infinite zoom.

Some say virtual anatomy can never replace the transcendent reality. Some say it is a huge improvement over smelly, greasy, inconvenient flesh. Both arguments will be fueled by “Dissection,” an extraordinary collection of photographs that makes even today’s flesh-and-blood anatomy laboratories look tame.

Photography soared in popularity after the Civil War, and in 1900 Eastman Kodak’s Brownie camera created armies of snapping amateurs. A vogue for photographing the gross anatomy class swept through American medical schools, as students were moved to recreate in black and white the iconic dissection scenes of Rembrandt and other great masters: scholarly doctors posing around the supine cadaver, scalpels in hand, gravitas on face.

Some student groups posed for professional photographers. Others took their own shots. The prints were mounted on living room walls, sent as postcards and even used as calling cards. By 1920 the craze had simmered down, and after World War II it was pretty much over.

But hundreds of these photographs endure. John Harley Warner, chairman of Yale’s History of Medicine program, and James M. Edmonson, curator of a museum of medical memorabilia at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, have culled more than 100 for what might under other circumstances be considered a coffee-table book. It is a striking, glossy, oversize volume, immensely decorative if shredded flesh and the odd bone are your idea of décor.

But as ghoulish as the cadavers in these shots may be — they range from pristine, untouched corpses to unrecognizable piles of picked-over remains — their shock value diminishes with each turned page. Conversely, the attention commanded by the groups of young students self-consciously posed around the dissecting table never wanes.....MORE...

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