[transcript]:

Stained-glass windows. A paper-thin slice of body, stark between two sheets of glass, glowing with perfectly placed lights passing through the body, illuminating each inner structure and  giving the appearance of a stained-glass window of skin, organs, and bone. It is the outline of a woman, pregnant, in the glass; you can see the fetus inside of her. The outlines of each organ were crisp and dark against a white background; the colors of bones, muscles, organs and flesh glow in reds and browns. Other bodies join the woman, standing tall in their brightly-lit display cases – a heavyset man, a small child, a muscular woman. They draw the eye. The exhibit is absorbing; body-windows are clear, no secrets can be covered from the viewer.

The pieces do not seem dead; there is no gore, no mess, no feeling of death surrounding the body-windows. It is clean, and cold. But each slice of body on display was once a person, and this is their preservation forever.

Death as art. I prefer this impersonal viewing of the corpse.

That exhibit was my eight-year-old self’s first encounter with death, and it shaped the way that I look at bodies. Although I am studying biology and medical history, I try very hard to avoid graphic depictions of blood, dissections, corpses. Thankfully, some historical medical illustrators did the same; for the project which culminated in this audio essay, I found another clear image, with no squeamishness, all clean lines and illuminated inner structures. You can see the image above.

The head and neck, are clean-cut, with light glowing through and showing clean lines of blood vessels and bones and the beginnings of the lungs. It appears more as line-art than as a photograph of a corpse. This is a good thing; I am able to separate this slice of a body, and think of it as an art piece, another stained-glass window, far away from the messiness and emotion of a corpse.

I am drawing the outlines of the head and neck, erasing and redrawing to round out the clumsy edges before I begin the intricate replication of blood vessels. I am following a tradition of thousands of years’ visual replication of the body through art. It is another way of both distancing oneself from the revulsion of death, while, paradoxically, focusing in entirely on death. The stroke of a pencil, or the click of the camera shutter, makes all the difference, creating a window through which death does not seem so intimidating.

In this image, the tissues, the thorax, the threads of blood vessels are too precise – the eyes and the brain are missing entirely – each organ is lined out and lit brightly, easy to see. There is no real depth in this image, and this is what finally reminds me of the old museum exhibit, the flat window-panes of bodies.

As long as we stay behind the window, and appreciate the art of the dead body, the grisliness of death feels removed from us. But when we begin to look closely through the window, we may not always be prepared for what we see.

I dug through old newspapers from the 1870’s to try and find out exactly how this picture was taken, why every detail was so clear and precise. This is what I found.

The bodies were frozen.

Like meat from the grocery, the bodies are frozen solid, stored in the deep freezer for days, months, and years as needed. Like meat, frozen bodies are removed from the freezer and sliced while still frozen to create thin cross-sections for a photograph, or for placement between panes of glass in a museum. My mother freezes and prepares pork, a meat that we do not eat often, in this same way.

Freezing a corpse aids in a clear preservation, and in viewing the clearest, most delicate details interwoven through overlapping body systems.  The frozen body carries the advantage of clarity and stillness, in clean and cold lines, in its high visibility; a thawed body is easy to dissect, and is nearly as fresh as an newly deceased corpse.

As long as a body, or a slice of body, is viewed through a camera lens or through a window pane, framed as art, much of the rawness goes away. We are altering death itself from something revolting into something beautiful, and functional; a rendering of a dead body aids medical students in learning to treat a living one. Looking through a stained-glass window removes us from the reality of seeing the body as meat.

It unsettles me that my first impression of the frozen body exhibit was awe, amazement at the beauty and clean lines of a human-esque stained-glass window. Looking through that window now shows both beauty and death, meat and art, humanish.

 

References

Barnett, Lauren. “Alienation and Beauty in Medical Photography.” Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine, vol. 41, no. 3, 2018, pp. 133–139.

Al-Gailani, Salim. “The ‘Ice Age’ of Anatomy and Obstetrics: Hand and Eye in the Promotion of Frozen Sections around 1900.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Schillace, Brandy. “Haunting Images: Photography and Dissection, An Online Exhibit.” Dittrick Medical History Center, 26 Oct. 2017.

Churchill, John. “Professor Rudinger’s New Sections.” The Medical Times and Gazette, vol. 2, 1879, pp. 564–564, accessed via Google Books digitized archives April 2021.

Diamond, Laura G. “Anatomy, Physics, Science for 3-5 Year Olds with Parents – NCJW Dallas – HIPPY Field Trips – Perot Museum.” NCJW Greater Dallas Section, 12 May 2017.