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

Time: 6:30 p.m.

Place: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

RSVP

Co-Sponsored by the Section on Medical History and the Section on Arts and Medicine

This presentation centers on John Harley Warner's and James Edmonson's recent book, which compiles and discusses photographs of dissection scenes made by medical students, a little-know but distinct genre. Featuring 138 rare, historic photographs, Dissection is a "landmark book" (Ruth Richardson) that reveals a startling piece of American history, the rite of passage into the mysteries of medicine captured in photography.

From the advent of photography in the 19th century and into the 20th century, medical students, often in secrecy, took photographs of themselves with the cadavers that they dissected: their first patients. The photographs were made in a variety of forms, from proud class portraits to staged dark-humor scenes, from personal documentation to images reproduced on postcards sent in the mail. Poignant, strange, disturbing, and humorous, they are all compelling.

These photographs were made at a time when Victorian societal taboos against intimate knowledge of the human body were uneasily set aside for medical students in pursuit of knowledge that could be gained only in the dissecting room. Dissection, writes Mary Roach, "documents—in archival photographs and informed, approachable prose—a heretofore almost entirely unknown genre, the dissection photograph."