SPLITTING HEADACHE: To create his anatomical drawings, Christian Wilhelm Braune used transparent paper to accurately trace details revealed at the surface of the frozen body slice. Working from those tracings, he then carefully produced detailed woodcuts and surrounded each resulting lithograph with a faint halo of annotations.COURTESY OF U.S NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINEOne of the most striking developments in 19th-century anatomical illustration was made possible not by a scalpel, but by a saw. Topographical anatomy, in which cadavers were sawed into slices to reveal a cross-sectional view of the organs and tissues inside, was attempted as early as the Renaissance. But, not surprisingly, the sawing motion distorted the placement of the body’s innards. It wasn’t until the early 1800s that Dutch anatomist Pieter de Riemer began to freeze the cadavers in order to harden tissues and ensure that organs stayed put when being sawed.
Russian anatomist Nikolay Pirogov was one of the first to use the technique. He took advantage of Russia’s long, cold winters to deep-freeze bodies below -18 °C before slicing them up to create the illustrations that filled his four-volume Topographical Anatomy, published in 1851–54. But the most accurate topographical anatomist, and the man who did more than anyone else to popularize the approach, was Christian Wilhelm Braune, a professor at the University of Leipzig in Germany. “He was the master,” says Michael Sappol, historian at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. “He [was] at the top of his profession, and his work [became] the gold standard.”
Braune describes parts of the process in his most famous book An Atlas of Topographical Anatomy: After ...
