Stiffs, Skulls & Skeletons

Book excerpt: This intriguing and comprehensive exploration of the skeleton and the dead body includes more than 400 rare photographs. Stanley B. Burns, MD, has studied, collected and written on medical photography for over four decades focusing on unexplored areas. His books have placed him in the forefront of medical photographic history scholarship. This work reveals the nineteenth-century fascination with the dead body and body parts. The classic visual iconography of postmortem, dissection, and bone photography is presented and expanded to include early autopsy images and X-ray studies. No prior visual work has presented the once very popular hobby of collecting skulls and also shown their use in racial and psychological profiling research. This sumptuously illustrated book with previously unpublished photographs is an extraordinary work of medical, historical and cultural research. It is a timeless visual essay that will surely become a standard resource for collectors, curators, artists, and scholars.