Stereoscopic Dissection

Last week's Science Times had a piece on the Bassett Stereoscopic Dissection Collection. The article discusses the 1962, twenty-five volume collection created by University of Washington anatomist William Bassett. His “Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy” included some 1,500 pairs of slides photographed by William B. Gruber, seen here. Frankly, the collection puts Body Worlds to shame.

The New York Times piece also, very fortuitously, led me to the Morbid Anatomy blog which bills itself as "Surveying the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture." Just yesterday the site launched its exhibition Anatomical Theater: Depictions of the Body, Disease, and Death in Medical Museums of the Western World, described therein as "a photographic exhibition documenting artifacts collected by and exhibited in medical museums throughout Europe and the United States."
It doesn't really get much better than this.

~ Postscript: I discovered later that if you are lucky enough to have access to pubmed, the atlas is available in downloadable form. If you don't have access, well, open-source for academic materials is definitely another topic for further discussion.