When Legs and Arms Won: The Culture of Dissection and the Role of the Camera at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania

In Fall 1906, three weeks into their freshman year, Elizabeth Cisney-Smith and her classmates were, as she wrote, “initiated” to the dissecting room of The Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP), one of the nation’s first degree-granting medical schools for women.¹ Per tradition, a crowd of upperclassmen assembled in the third floor hall, just outside the dissecting room door, to see which of the “squeamish” freshmen would faint at the sight of a cadaver. The doors were opened; the white sheets draping the dead were tossed aside; but, to the crowd’s dismay, not a single student collapsed. In fact, stated Smith proudly, “no one ever did in my class.”

Coursework in Practical Anatomy was taught at WMCP over a period of two years. Students were required to dissect specified body parts in order to pass each semester. In the beginning, recalled Smith, the Demonstrator of Anatomy assigned four freshmen to each body, “two on arms – two on legs. I was given an arm fortunately — not so messy — and was kept on it for five weeks. The next semester I was given a leg for five weeks.”

The following year, due to her mother’s failing health from bowel cancer, Smith condensed the entirety of her sophomore dissections — which included the head, abdomen, and chest — down to an intensive ten-week course. “That almost finished me physically,” she remembered, “as ten weeks is too long of that kind of work without a change.”

During this concentrated period of dissection, Smith learned a truth about the undissected portions of their cadavers, and how “the sophomores used the bodies … between freshman periods.” Within the material economy of the WMCP dissecting room, cadavers became commodities. Students in the various classes mapped their personal territories upon the body and its prized preferential parts, like explorers laying claim to newly discovered lands.

To declare dominion within these corporeal anatomical atlases implied an assumed level of ownership. Practically, though, it ensured that the cadaver — and the delicate work done within — was safeguarded from the potentially careless behaviors of the living. To this end, warned Smith, if “a head dissector ever edged in on an arm dissector or an abdomen person came around when the leg lady was working, there was a real war.” That war she would soon witness firsthand:

[gblockquote]One Mary Parker from Boston was a typical researcher — overzealous — domineering, etc. etc., and not content with doing regular scheduled work. [She] came in one day during my freshman period “on arm” and started extracting teeth from her “head” subject — a very big fine set of teeth in what was left of our colored subject — students were not required to extract teeth but Mary Parker of Boston wanted to do everything. Any way teeth began to fly and also the arms and legs were being disturbed — that was the first time I ever saw women in a real fight and it was not very dignified but did settle Mary Parker. Of course legs and arms won.[/gblockquote]

On Acclimating to the Cut

The primary purpose of anatomical dissection was technical in nature, providing knowledge of the topography, function, and relationships of the internal structures of the human body. But, on social and professional levels, it was also designed to be transformative by desensitizing students to death, disease, and the dead body. Thus, as a transformative rite of passage, dissection was intrinsically linked to student identity.

Nonetheless, acclimating the living dissector to the sight, smell, and feel of the dissected dead was an arduous procedure. Many medical students, across a variety of backgrounds, religions, universities, and genders, felt slicing into a cadaver’s flesh was a horrific ritual. In November 1847, over a half-century before Smith laid eyes on her first cadaver, Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female physician, described how her male classmates at Geneva Medical College had “blushed … were hysterical, and … held down their faces and shook” during a particularly explicit dissection.² As to her own response, declared Blackwell, “My delicacy was certainly shocked, I had to pinch my hand till the blood nearly came, and call on Christ to help me.”³

To become accustomed to such scenes, students needed to ignore their senses, overcome their nightmares, and force themselves “to beat down the aversion to cutting flesh that had once been living, even as you or I,” explained WMCP student, Edith Flower Wheeler.⁴ Although overcoming “the shrinking from touching a very cold dead body,” was admittedly difficult, “it could be done.”⁵ And in time, assured Wheeler, dedicating oneself to an interest in anatomy “blotted out the shrinking.”⁶

On Commemorating the Cut

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, medical students at nearly every medical school in America began commemorating the transformative ritual of dissection by posing for photographic portraits with their cadavers. This unlikeliest of medical traditions emerged as a dominant form of self-expression around the 1880s, and continued in earnest until roughly the early 1930s.⁷

Dissection photographs ranged from large mounted prints to small personal mementos stored in wallets and even postcards mailed home to unsuspecting loved ones. The scenes they evidenced also varied in explicitness, from formal portraits honoring the bodies of the dead to tableaus transgressing the boundaries of flesh, professional identity, photographic aesthetics, and societal “good taste.”

As medical historian John Harley Warner discusses, dissection photographs “recount the rite of passage to a new identity — they present a professional coming-of-age narrative.”⁸ By 1900, thanks to advances in photographic technologies, medical students became the authors of their own narratives. With the introduction of cameras like George Eastman’s Kodak — marketed keenly toward amateur photographers and women — the photographic realm was no longer the exclusive domain of commercial photographers; now anyone could take a photograph. All one needed was a camera. Luckily for Elizabeth Cisney-Smith, her husband Edwin (a medical student at nearby Jefferson Medical College) was an amateur photographer and owned several.

On Transcending the Cut

In the hands of student-photographers, the camera became both submissive and subversive. It was the method and the means to not only commemorate anatomical dissection, but also evidence, experiment with, and explore the physical, emotional, moral, and psychological facets of the complex relationship between student and cadaver.

Students at WMCP had been using photography to form and fortify more personal iterations of their identities since the 1890s. Posing with cadavers, and each other, freed them in part from the limiting conventions of centuries of anatomical imagery — images that placed women in the seemingly eternal role of the dissected, never the dissector.⁹ With the push of a button and the millisecond snap of a camera shutter, students could now take advantage of their representative agency. In doing so they could transgress many of the social strictures, biases, and criticisms that had plagued their numbers since WMCP’s founding over a half century ago. Perhaps the most pervasive criticism of the times was that involvement in anatomical dissection violated a law of a woman’s being.¹⁰

Generally speaking, dissecting rooms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were grotesque, filthy spaces. With no long-term means of preserving human remains or administrative oversight to police morally questionable behaviors (usually involving the cadaver), these rooms were often filled with the rotting bodies of the dead and the equally rotten behaviors of the living. According to public opinion, an environment such as this was no place for a woman.

Indeed, many “wise men and honorable women” feared for the purity of the female form and psyche within the confines of the American medical school.¹¹ Prominent physicians gave lectures against women becoming doctors, convinced such a path could only result in “scenes of maternal neglect, domestic discord, and annihilated social distinctions.”¹² The Massachusetts physician and skeptic, Dr. Dan King, railed against female dissectors in the pages of his book, Quackery Unmasked (1858), warning his readers that the obtainment of anatomical knowledge threatened to transform a woman from the “pride and ornament of the race — the sacred repository of all that is virtuous and lovely,” into a sexless “monster in the garb of a female, a nondescript, a being sui generis… when she enters the fetid laboratory of the anatomist, and plunges her hands into the gore of dead men, she loses all her feminine loveliness, and appears like a fallen angel, an object of universal horror and disgust.”¹³

Women physicians, such as WMCP’s Professor of Anatomy and Histology, Emeline H. Cleveland, weathered the storm of criticisms by using detractors own words against them. Cleveland countered that the feminine virtues bemoaned to be lost to a woman in the pursuit of a medical career were, in fact, the very traits that made her well suited for an equal place within the ranks of the profession:

[gblockquote]We know it has been objected that familiarity with such subjects as belong properly to the science of medicine, with anatomy and kindred studies, cannot fail to injure or destroy those feelings of delicacy and refinement which add peculiar lustre to the character of woman. Far be it from us to remove one restraint upon woman’s virtue, or lessen in any wise the demands of society that she be characterized by tender affections and refined delicacy. Her strength lies ever in her integrity; but we look upon that sentiment which would exclude her from knowledge so eminently adapted to open, exalt and purify her mind, as unworthy of her regard, and debasing to the spirit that entertains it; and we strenuously advocate the necessity of giving to all women a knowledge of the human body … and we do it remembering their high vocation as nature’s appointed guardians of childhood and youth, that as mothers and teachers they become natural conservators of the public health, and in an eminent degree responsible for the physical and moral evils which afflict society.¹⁴[/gblockquote]

“Cutting Up”

Meanwhile, students at WMCP took up their cameras and resorted to more visually explicit and progressive means of expressing their suitability to a career in medicine.

To some, this meant creating commemorative portraiture that showed themselves working diligently, and confidently within the gritty confines of the dissecting room. Others chose to pose alone inside the college’s medical museum, surrounded by jarred organs, papier-mâché manikins, and disembodied limbs.

Others still, engaged in gallows humor, flaunting their comfort with the emblems and acts of their chosen profession (usually in the privacy of their boarding-house rooms) by dressing articulated skeletons in street clothes, giving them nicknames and pretending they were reanimated, or wearing portions of skulls atop their own heads.¹⁵

Soon, the visual culture of student life and professional development at WMCP would no longer be consigned to a communal experience overseen by disapproving faculty, male students, a skeptical public, or mitigated by the critical eye of a professional photographer. Now they could speak to individualized experiences, as individualized by the students themselves, be it in the dissecting room, the clinic, in public, or in their homes.

With an eye towards transgressing the traditions of the past in a way that spoke to her unique situation (as a woman married to a fellow medical student), Smith snuck her husband’s camera, and Edwin along with it, into the dissecting room of WMCP. Edwin set the timer; they positioned themselves behind a cadaver; and together, husband and wife commemorated a rite of passage their respective schools decreed must always be done separately. Today, it is the only known image of the Smiths jointly engaged in medical education.

While modern viewers may dismiss dissection photographs, like those by the Smiths, as mere grotesqueries, they exist today as an inseparable part of our medical heritage. To fully appreciate how the commemorated experiences — as well as the experiences involved in taking photographs — transformed countless medical students around the world on personal, professional, and social levels, look no further than Smith’s own words. As an elderly woman, reflecting back on the significant events of her time at WMCP, and the events she memorialized through photography, she wrote, “At last life had begun for us in a way that was completely satisfying.”

Brandon Zimmerman

Brandon Zimmerman holds a Master’s Degree in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from The University of Rochester and George Eastman Museum. For over the past fifteen years he has worked as an exhibit developer, curator, researcher, and designer for numerous museums, libraries, archives, and private clients in The United States and Europe. He can be reached at brandozim@gmail.com.

• Brandon Zimmerman

  https://nursingclio.org/author/brandon-zimmerman/

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