Back to the Future: William Gruber’s Medical Photography

The New York Times has a fascinating article, and lots of imagery online, about the collaboration between David L. Bassett, and William Gruber, an anatomist and photographer, respectively. In the 1960’s these two worked together to create an exhaustive trove of medical imagery, using cadavers preserved with formaldehyde and injected with colored ink. Gruber was originally a pipe organ maker from Germany, and became wealthy with his invention of the View-Master.

Ok, so here’s where this gets really cool: Because Gruber was so interested in stereoscopic imagery, he made all the images with paired Kodachrome slides, so that they could be viewed with the view-master to appear 3 dimensional. The eventual 25 volumes the two created together and published in 1962, entitled “Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy”, was groundbreaking but soon went out of publication. Now these images are going to be available online; Stanford University School of Medicine, and eHuman, a Silicon Vallery company, are both putting the images online. eHuman will charge a fee to look at the images; you can see the head and neck collection (the only one available so far) for just 8 bucks a month!

These images are quite amazing, and reminiscent of the Bodies Exhibition. It’s amazing they’re taken in the 60’s, and even more amazing that it’s the View-Master inventor who made them. Ehuman’s CEO says that eventually we’ll even be able to see the images in stereo online, by using those video game 3d glasses.

Here are some of the images from the Times slideshow:

boo!