The Body in Depth

NY Times ^ | April 22, 2008 | JOHN SCHWARTZ

[neverdem]

Roberta Corson recalled her father’s dissection lab as a happy place.

Her father, David L. Bassett, was an expert in anatomy and dissection at the University of Washington. For more than 17 years, he was engaged in creating what has been called the most painstaking and detailed set of images of the human body, inside and out, ever produced. In 3-D.

Working closely with William Gruber, the inventor of the View-Master, the three-dimensional viewing system that GAF Corporation popularized as a toy in the 1960s, Dr. Bassett created the 25-volume “Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy” in 1962. It included some 1,500 pairs of slides, along with line drawings that made the details more discernible. The paired slides could be examined with a View-Master, making the chest cavity look cavernous, and making details of structure and tissue stand out unforgettably.

The atlas was an immediate success and the images became an important resource for medical students, even more so as schools have de-emphasized gross anatomy and cadaver work. But the atlas eventually went out of publication in the 1960s.

Thanks to Stanford University’s school of medicine, however, the work will soon...

--snip--

She said she believed the formaldehyde that was such a large part of her father’s work contributed to his death, from a combination of rare biochemical diseases that caused his heart, lungs and other organs to thicken. “I always wondered,” she said.

Still, the work survives. For all his knowledge, Mrs. Corson said, her father retained a sense of “amazement and wonder” at the complexity of the bodies he deconstructed.

Once, she recalled, he held up his hand and turned it over before her. “I know every muscle,” he told her. “I know ever nerve and every vessel in the hand. But there’s so much I will never know.”

[neverdem]

Slide Show An Atlas of the Human Body

The Bassett Collection on Flickr

[Squeako]

Absolutely fascinating.

[TChad]

She said she believed the formaldehyde that was such a large part of her father’s work contributed to his death, from a combination of rare biochemical diseases that caused his heart, lungs and other organs to thicken. “I always wondered,” she said.

I believe it. That stuff is vile.

[wideminded]

The shows featuring preserved human bodies that have been touring recently have been extensively criticized on FR. But I have to say that when I visited one the various dissections I saw were much better than the older ones in the collection you linked to or that I have seen in anatomy books.

[rlmorel]

I went to the exhibit in Boston when it first came out. I work in medicine, so I found it interesting, but...

It got creepy fairly quickly. Then began to appear ghoulish.

I think it was the creepy way he signed everything, like an artist. It just was...wrong.

[wastoute]

I took two semesters of Gross at Med School and at the end I could hardly feel my hands. I can’t imagine a lifetime in the lab.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

“But there’s so much I will never know.”

He sounds just like my supergenius Mom.

[LucyT]

Thanks for posting those links; excellent photos.

[TChad]

I wear contact lenses, and I swear the stuff concentrates and pools under them. It was like ultra-concentrated smog eating at my eyes.

I always hated having to open up a new, unexplored "pocket" that would issue a billowing invisible cloud of fresh, potent formaldehyde-formalin. Bleaugh.

I can’t imagine a lifetime in the lab.

Neither can I. Not in an anatomy lab, anyway.