Main 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: Photography is Dead.
1. Dissection Photography: An Evolving Genre
2. Defining the Disgust: Abjection, the Cadaver, and Dissection Photography
3. Dissection Photography and Forms of Transgressive Behavior
4. Flesh in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
5. Dissection Photography, Gender, and Race.
6. Postmarked Post-mortems