At its basest level, what act is more abject than dissection? What action signifies the concept of challenging established social taboos, of blurring the boundaries between the self and the other more than the flaying and dismemberment of the body of another human being? And therefore, what photographic genre deserves a more prominent place in the historical canon of abjectified art than dissection photography? What photograph carries more abject significance than an image that coexists in the interstices between social repugnance and a hallowed expression of the cooperative social experiences of legions of students? Should it not be collected and stored in the vaults of the world's preeminent photographic archives? Should it not be hung on the walls of museums and studied as intensely as the portraits of photographic luminaries like Yousuf Karsh, Diane Arbus, or James Van Der Zee?

I can already guess your answer: No, they should not. For dissection photographs should never have been taken; and they most certainly should never be taken again. But you should know that genres like documentary photography and journalistic photography often portray the same subject matter as medical and anthropological photography. And yet, the genre of medical photography, in all its varying forms, has subsisted almost exclusively outside the scope of photographic history's authoritative canonical texts. Scholars view this lack of situation within the larger photographic realm as a marginalizing act, stripping medical photographs of their significance and aesthetic qualities. Even in the age in which informed consent was conceptually nonexistent, this mode of thinking was nothing new.

In 1859, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet wrote: