Dissection Photography: Cadavers, Abjection, and the Formation of Identity (Death and Culture)

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. Front Cover Series page Dissection Photography: Cadavers, Abjection, and the Formation of Identity Copyright information Dedication Table of Contents Series Editors’ Preface List of Figures Note from the Publisher Introduction: My Companions in Misery Must be seen to be believed Postmarked postmortems The demise of cameras and cadavers Hiding in plain sight Without looking Dissection photography: an evolving genre 1 The Stages of an Evolving Genre Confusing conventions of counterculture The three stages of evolution Stage I (circa 1880–1930) Stage II (circa 1895–1930) Stage III (circa 1905–1925) 2 Photography Is Dead Dead machinery Convincing humanity A grim reality: “the heart is not satisfied” Life from lifelessness 3 Defining Disgust: Abjection, Photography, and the Cadaver Exposing the cadaver: on becoming ambiguous and abject Transcending the rot: turning ritual transgressions into transgressive rituals An anus by any other name would still excrete: abjection and the limitations of cadaveric objectification A proper sense of disgust 4 Is Dissection Photography Really a Genre? Adapting to life in a moral world What dreams may come? 5 Iconographic Ambiguities Digging up the past: grave robbing and its relation to the origins of dissection photography Of shutters and shuddering horror Dissecting Black identity 6 A Necessary Inhumanity Cruel winter: hazing rituals and the American dissecting room Let all men be brothers Waste not want not Traversing the land of the dead 7 No One Ever Did: Dissection Photography and Female Identity Always the dissected, never the dissector It’s no joke What’s in a name? When legs and arms won 8 Of Sharp Minds and Sharpened Tools: Dissection Photography and the Ambiguity of the Scalpel The purity of the knife The hand of nature The pen is mightier than the scalpel Adapting to the cut The authority of the knife Cutting up while cutting up the cadaver Over the top, under the knife: photography’s use to “appear wicked” 9 Flesh in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Skin deep: interpreting the aesthetics of dead flesh Imagining the unimaginable Just merely asleep Emulsional damage: fading in albumen and gelatin silver dissection photographs Flesh under wraps 10 Location, Location, Location As above so below ‘Chris’ Baker: the one who literally walked with death Gone in a flash 11 Anatomical Deuteranopia Blood culture: red is dead Meat is murder The problem with color: determining the race of the dead Hueman beings 12 To Begin without Fear A dead anything A modern Golgotha Cadaverse: poetry in the dissecting room The word made flesh: dissecting table epigraphs Religious affiliations Not all dead Fear of rebirth 13 The Cadaver as (Self-)Portrait Everyone’s a critic More than mortal The doctor and the devils Who dissects the dissectors? Conclusion: “Learning to Fight Death Next to Death Itself” Acknowledgments Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Conclusion References Index