Full Description
Contemporary audiences are often shocked to learn that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, medical students around the world posed for photographic portraits with their cadavers; a genre known as dissection photography.
Featuring previously unseen images, stories, and anecdotes, this book explores the visual culture of death within the gross anatomy lab through the tradition of dissection photography, examining its historical aspects from both photographic and medical perspectives.
The author pays particular attention to the use of dissection photographs as an expression of student identity, and as an evolving transgressive ritual intricately connected to, and eventually superseding, the act of dissection itself.
Contents
Introduction: My Companions in Misery
1. The Stages of an Evolving Genre
2. Photography Is Dead
3. Defining Disgust: Abjection, Photography, and the Cadaver
4. Is Dissection Photography Really a Genre?
5. Iconographic Ambiguities
6. A Necessary Inhumanity
7. No One Ever Did: Dissection Photography and Female Identity
8. Of Sharp Minds and Sharpened Tools: Dissection Photography and the Ambiguity of the Scalpel
9. Flesh in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
10. Location, Location, Location
11. Anatomical Deuteranopia
12. To Begin without Fear
13. The Cadaver as (Self-)Portrait
Conclusion: "Learning to Fight Death Next to Death Itself"
