Understanding why medical and dental students of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were seemingly impelled to create dissection photographs requires one to step outside all conceivable comfort zones and embrace a type of photography that exists in flagrant opposition to the ethics of the modern world. To fully comprehend the importance and influence of photography and dissection upon American students in the 1880s and 1890s, we must spend some time in the 1860s and 1870s, the decades immediately preceding the genesis of dissection photography as a quantifiable genre.

The era that followed the American Civil War was marked by a significant increase in the nation's awareness of and proximity to “inhumanely objective” photographic records of mutilated bodies and decomposing corpses, such as the images of fallen soldiers from Antietam on display at Matthew Brady's New York exhibition. Advanced technologically by innovations such as magnesium flash, gelatin dry plates, and handheld cameras, postbellum-era photography expanded the medium's reach until it penetrated even the dankest and rankest corners of the globe. Riding at the forefront of this expansion was photographic portraiture, since repositioned to exist outside the photographer's skylight studio in places as varied as the common American home, the scorched battlefield, and the filthy dissecting room.

By the 1860s, photography's popularity and cultural acceptance found dominant utility to enact a great equalization upon the various social classes of the world. Now anyone could sit and have their portrait taken. As the editors of the popular photographic journal, The Philadelphia Photographer, attested in 1864, when it came to the ‘who’ of photographic portraiture – which is to say, who had their portraits taken – anyone from the weary soldier to the local priest, to artists, politicians, and tradesmen, all were “compelled to submit to their faces being made articles of commerce,” and sometimes “subjects of curiosity.”

In as little as 25 years following photography's ‘invention’ in 1839, photographic portraiture became an authoritative and patriotic pastime. Increasing its authority in the United States was linked to furthering American industry. As the Photographer pointed out, even “[t] he pickpocket and the burglar” all had “their own part to perform in photography for the public good.”