Body as Art Inspires Body of Art
Authors: Lynne Lamberg
Journal: JAMA (2005)

WASHINGTON, DC—A schoolboy visiting the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) halts before a skeleton his own height. Examining his hand, he wiggles his fingers experimentally. He bends to squeeze his knee, and studies the bare bones again, as if peering into a magic mirror that has stripped away his soft tissues. Moments later, he joins a classmate gazing at a fetal preparation in a jar. “That’s fake,” the other boy asserts. “No, it’s real,” interjects Adrianne Noe, PhD, NMHM’s director, who overhears the boys while showing a visitor around the museum. “Everything here is real,” she tells them. Not quite everything. TheHumanBodyRevealed,anexhibit atthemuseumthroughmid-August2005, offers novel views of the body’s internal landscape—views thatcannotbeseen in real life, although they are anatomically accurate even at the cellular level. In some works, transparent skin or cut-away views expose organs, blood vessels, muscles, and bones from a nearly three-dimensional perspective. This is not the bloody pulsating field surgeons see after making an incision. Rather, discrete parts or systems of the body stand out, luminous and resplendent. Different planes and angles show organs and other structures in relation to their surroundings. Some display organs, tissues, even cells, much magnified, often with specific features spotlighted in unnatural tints. In one such work, the hypothalamus shimmers in fluorescent violet at the center of the brain. The distinctive color proclaims the gland’s key role as home to the body’s master clock and regulator of sleeping and waking, body temperature, eating, and reproduction. “This exhibit represents another step in the history of anatomic presentation,” Noe says. “It advances how we know what we know about the human body. It uses some information available to clinicians, some available only to researchers, and some unique to the artist, and weaves it all together in a way that is both elegant and beautiful. “Theworksherehaveaphotographic beginning, an image that derives from the physical quality of the object,” Noe adds. “That imagehasbeen transformed by the mind and hand of the artist.” Artist and photojournalist Alexander Tsiaras, working with more than 55 artists and programmers at his firm, Anatomical Travelogue (http://www .anatomicaltravel.com), drew on several sets of data to produce the works in the NMHM exhibit. A key data set came from the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project (VHP). The VHP consists of complete threedimensional representations of the bodies of a man and a woman: the male, a 39-year-old convict executed in Texas by lethal injection, and the woman, a 59year-old Maryland homemaker who died of cardiovascular disease. Both bodies were acquired by donation and met ethical standards of informed consent. Scientists scanned the cadavers, using computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. They froze the corpses in blue gelatin and milled them to obtain thin serial cross-sections of tissue. Layer by layer, head to toe, each exposed surface was digitally photographed. The result is a digitized library of the human body with three data sets that can be manipulated as one (http: //www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/).