Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930 PDF

Rating: (14 reviews) Author: John Harley Warner ISBN : 9780922233342 New from $31.00 Format: PDF

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"Cadavers, camera, action!" (The New York Times Book Review). From the advent of photography in the 19th and into the 20th century, medical students, often in secrecy, took photographs of themselves with the cadavers that they dissected: their first patients. Featuring 138 of these historic photographs and illuminating essays by two experts on the subject, Dissection reveals a startling piece of American history. Sherwin Nuland, MD, said this is "a truly unique and important book [that] documents a period in medical education in a way that is matched by no other existing contribution." And Mary Roach said Dissection "is the most extraordinary book I have ever seen--the perfect coffee table book for all the households where I'd most like to be invited for coffee."

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Blast Books; 1 edition (May 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0922233349
• ISBN-13: 978-0922233342
• Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 8.9 x 10.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930 PDF

If I could choose to take one class again from back in medical school, it would be an easy choice. I'd do gross anatomy again, the cadaver lab. It was in many ways the most interesting of the courses, learning about the details of the complex cosmos of innards that each one of us carries about. It was a social learning process; my cadaver partners and I were all new to medical school, and we were helping each other in taking apart our specimen, and exposing structures we had never before seen. It was certainly a rite of passage, an initiation that only upcoming doctors got, gaining arcane knowledge that few others needed (or wanted, for that matter). To that end, my gross anatomy lab, with around eighteen tables in it, each containing a tank of formaldehyde into which the cadaver could be lowered at the end of the day's cutting, was a restricted area. No one except us medical students, and our instructors, were supposed to be in there. I did, one time, sneak my wife in, so that she could see where I was spending all that time. There was also a strict rule: there were never to be any cameras in the lab. As far as I know, there never were. Yet this was not always the case, as demonstrated by a strange, morbidly entertaining, and enlightening volume _Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880 - 1930_ (Blast Books) by John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson. Both authors are medical historians, and Edmonson is curator of the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum of Case Western Reserve University from which most of these photographs come. The pictures are not anatomical studies, but document students at work (and play) as well as giving visual demonstration of social attitudes within medical education at the time.