His father, David L. Bassett, was an expert in anatomy and dissection at the University of Washington. For more than 17 years, he toiled to create what is considered the most thorough and detailed set of images of the human body, inside and out, in history. And also in three dimensions (3D).
Bassett worked closely with William Gruber, the creator of the View-Master, a three-dimensional viewing system that the GAF Corporation popularized as a toy in the 1960s.
Bassett created all 25 volumes of the Stereoscopic Atlas of human anatomy in 1962. It included about 1.500 pairs of plates, as well as line drawings that made the details easier to appreciate. The pairs of plates could be seen with the View-Master, which made the chest cavity appear cavernous, and the details of the structures and tissues were permanently imprinted on us.
The atlas was an immediate success and the images became an important resource for medical students, especially when schools stopped placing so much emphasis on gross anatomy or working with cadavers. But the atlas stopped being published in the 1960s.
However, thanks to the Stanford University School of Medicine, this work will soon be available to the world again, as the institution plans to post the images on the Internet.
The faculty has also worked with eHuman, a company from nearby Silicon Valley that aims to charge students and curious people for access to this treasure. Hovering your computer mouse over the images on the eHuman page will highlight the anatomical details, and you will be able to consult the line drawings of the atlas. For now, access to the head and neck collection costs about five euros per month. At the moment, it is the only thing that is on the Internet.
Even without stereoscopic magnification, the images are impressive. Blood vessels tangle like a skein along the spine, and the pelvic bones stand out like butterflies against a black background. The back of a head, from which the layer of flesh and bone has been removed, shows the excavation of the skull to the brain, and it is as if we were observing a stratified wall of a ravine. The carefully preserved original Kodachrome slides continue to provide images of tremendous clarity.
Robert Chase, professor emeritus of surgery at Stanford University who holds the Emile Holman Chair and curator of the Bassett collection, says that "it will never be duplicated," because the work is so precise and meticulously crafted that few institutions could afford it. reproduce it. Bassett's widow, Lucille Bassett, left the collection to Stanford University in her will.
Perhaps in the future those who own the increasingly popular 3D glasses for video games will be able to view images on the Internet with stereo sound, predicts Robert Austrian, general director of eHuman. These devices have electronic shutters that provide the optical illusion of three dimensions by giving each eye a different perspective.
Corson made public various notes from her mother's unpublished memoirs, in which she said that before Gruber proposed to her husband to create a stereoscopic atlas, a similar attempt to create two-dimensional images had occurred in a project at the University of California. . An anatomist "attempted to work with unembalmed bodies of executed prisoners." The result, Bassett's wife explained, "was a disgusting, bloody mess."
Bassett and Gruber concluded that by using embalmed bodies they could work with better preserved tissues.
Her husband began the great work of his life with the head and neck. Roberta was three years old at the time (she is now 64). "I grew up among corpses and dissections," just like her three brothers.
"We went there to pick up the mail," and "I grew up with the sense of calm that anatomy labs and cadavers gave me." He remembers: "There was nothing disgusting or ugly about them. It was beautiful."
Corson says that his father, who died in 1966 at the age of 52, never ceased to be "surprised and fascinated," despite his extensive knowledge, by the complexity of the bodies he deconstructed.
On one occasion, Corson remembers, he raised his hand and waved it before her. "I know every muscle," she told him. "I know every nerve and every blood vessel in my hand. But there are many things I will never know."