Dissection: Photographs Of A Rite Of Passage In American Medicine, 1880-1930

DISSECTION: PHOTOGRAPHS OF A RITE OF PASSAGE IN AMERICAN MEDICINE, 1880-1930

John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson

New York: Blast Books, 2009 The rise of a new genre in photography, typically depicting a small group of students posted in the dissection room with a single cadaver, reflected the importance students attached to the shared group experience of anatomical study. By the early 1880s, after technological changes had made photography widely available, such photographs proliferated at medical schools across the country. Like other group portraits, these photographs capture not only particular moments but also social relations—in this case, between the dissectors and cadaver, the lay community the dissectors had in some ways left behind, and the professional fraternity they were joining. Above all, it was a relationship among the dissectors that the photographs commemorated.

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Their sheer ubiquity is remarkable. Dissection photographs survive from schools in the north, south, and west; from urban centers such as Chicago, New York, and New Orleans as well as from small-town medical schools; in leading universityaffiliated schools as well as in patently proprietary institutions. . . . Students assembled before the camera at “regular” medical schools (those at the time called allopathic only by their critics), and homeopathic, osteopathic, and chiropractic schools, and dental schools, where the close kinship with medical education was reflected not least of all in the shared practice of human dissection.

—from John Harley Warner’s essay