Heart Sounds

Because yesterday I learned
that the heart is a beautiful thing
and today I learned that
it is sometimes
not.

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.

Gross Anatomy

In fact, I am extraordinarily excited about my 'second life' as a nurse. That having been said, I have searched endlessly for blogs that offer some great insight into nursing practice, personal experience or some teeth-sinking clinical encounters. Two blogs I really like are The One Year Nurse and Dust in the Wind. gNat of one year has perhaps the best link I've seen thus far, which is a gross anatomy tutorial-of-sorts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. You can see it here.

This anatomist is so precise, tactile, corporeally keen that watching the anatomy dissections has become a family affair.