“They reviewed them before Bassett took one more step in dissection and over the years assembled this enormous collection of images.” “And then the films had to be sent to Rochester, New York, to be processed, which took a couple of weeks,” Chase says. For 17 years, Gruber traveled back and forth between his home in Washington state and Stanford, where he would photograph Bassett’s dissections on Kodachrome 35mm film. A German immigrant who had built organs and pianos in Munich, Gruber had put his love of photography to commercial use by inventing the View-Master stereoscope, introduced in 1939. “It’s probably the best collection of anatomical dissection images there ever will be because no one else is going to spend the 17 years that David did.”īeginning in 1948, Bassett, an associate professor of anatomy known for his meticulous dissections, invited William B. The Bassett photographs are one-of-a-kind, Chase says. “External occipital protuberance, unusually prominent in this case,” Chase says, describing a compelling image of a saucer-shaped bone at the back of the skull. “Optic pathways dissected in situ, viewed from above,” the surgeon intones, as a user rolls his mouse over a dissected eyeball. The first set of images-of the head and neck-from a newly digitized version of the collection was released in February with whiz-bang interactive labels and narration by Chase. “What they really wanted to see was shoulders, hips, knees and cruciate ligaments-things operated on.”Ĭhase, the Emile Holman Professor of Surgery, emeritus, is curator of the School of Medicine’s renowned Bassett collection of photographs of human dissection.
“And suddenly there was a line of people waiting to put on the 3-D glasses and see the images,” he recalls.
Robert Chase powered up his laptop, opening a previously unseen world of vivid color photographs. During a recent noon-hour visit to Apple headquarters, Dr.
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