At the turn of the 19th century, medical students commonly posed for photographs with their deceased subjects. “Privileged access to the body marked a social, moral, and emotional boundary crossing,” wrote John Harley Warner and James M. Edmondson in Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930.
As the quote scrawled on the table in this photo explained, it was this particular students’ dream to change places with the cadavers and have them “pose” with him. How exactly he arranged all of the cadavers before taking the photo remains a bit of a mystery.
