July 8, 1999

LIBRARY / HUMAN ANATOMY

Computers Open a Window on the Body

By ABIGAIL ZUGER

Human anatomy is a subject that can veer in an instant from thrilling and chilling to dry as dust.



George B. Diebold/The Stock Market
Overview

• Computers Open a Window on the Body

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• Body Voyage

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During the Renaissance, public dissections provided all the recreational titillation that we get from gory movies and roller coasters today. In Italy, prominent people, often masked and dressed in costume, crowded into dissection amphitheaters during carnival time. Servants passed out flowers, oranges and sticks of incense to dispel the noxious odors of the proceedings. Two smoking torches illuminated the dissection table, where the professor of anatomy, robed in red, pointed out structures of interest with a long, tapered rod.

Although the demonstrations were intended to provoke a mood of solemn moral reflection, audiences tended to become a little giddy, particularly when female anatomy was displayed.

In Holland, the medical historian Frank Gonzalez-Crussi wrote in ""Suspended Animation"" (Harcourt Brace, 1995), laws actually had to be passed ""to check the inappropriate outbursts of persons who laughed, clapped, asked indecent questions, grabbed the specimens prepared by the dissector, or otherwise attempted to disrupt the solemnity of the occasion.""

For anatomy without a trace of pageantry or prurience, open a copy of ""Gray's Anatomy,"" which has been periodically reissued in all its incomparable turgor for the last century and a half.

""The entire skeleton in the adult consists of 200 distinct bones,"" begins Dr. Gray, and he proceeds to list them all, followed by all the joints, and all the ligaments, muscles, nerves, arteries and veins, totaling tens of thousands of structures, most with long Latin names, their three-dimensional intricacy reduced to enormous incomprehensible paragraphs with very few illustrations. Medical students are reduced to tears by Dr. Gray and anatomists like him who bled all the color and art from their subject and demand rote memorization instead.

Computers have provided the opportunity to combine the precision of the classical texts with some of the three-dimensional thrills and chills that kept those Renaissance audiences glued to their benches.


Brain Site
www.vh.org/Providers/Textbooks/BrainAnatomy/BrainAnatomy.html

The anatomy of the brain is the most difficult of any part of the body to visualize, with complicated structures crumpled together into a space the size of a cantaloupe. Neuroanatomists at the University of Iowa have put together a set of detailed photographs of sections of the human brain, with schematic drawings that allow each structure to be identified. The result is the equivalent of a very good textbook of brain anatomy.

AMA Site
www.ama-assn.org/insight/gen_hlth/atlas/atlas.htm

Sometimes detailed anatomical photographs are only distracting when what you really need is a quick idea of what exactly it means that a relative's stroke may have damaged Wernicke's area of the brain.

This site, sponsored by the American Medical Association, provides simple line drawings , with brief explanations of how the organs work.

Dr. Abigail Zuger, a practicing internist, often writes about medical issues for The New York Times.




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