In the spring of 1909, medical student, Stewart Elliott, mailed a dissection postcard addressed to his sister Ada, a schoolteacher living in Denton, Texas. “Dear Sister. This is a pleasant spectacle isn't it?” he inquired. “But this is what we do a day and a half out of five. I like it too. Isn't half as bad as it seems.” Stewart's message concluded with an inquiry into Ada's own work. “How's school teaching [?] Coming along first rate I hope. With love from Stewart.” Ada no doubt smiled at this heart-warming note. That is, until she flipped the postcard over.

Upon seeing the ‘pleasant spectacle’ her brother had sent her from afar, Ada Elliott's smile likely didn't last long. For although the image was undeniably spectacular – in the sense of being visually striking enough to elicit emotional impact – pleasant was probably not the word a schoolteacher would have used to describe it.

The photograph showed Stewart; posed behind a draped dissecting table along with three of his classmates (Figure 8.1). Each member of the quartet stood dressed in their white coat and each clenched a scalpel. Their dissected cadaver sat upright and squat upon the table in front of them. The top edge of the photographic frame severed its head at the jawline. Its chest cavity, now empty, was all but a shadowy window to nowhere, framed by the rectangular remnants of a sawed-off breastplate. The students had bent and then crossed the cadaver's bandaged fleshy legs at odd angles. A mass of tangled fabric lay between them, obscuring its groin. From out of this makeshift womb of swaddling emerged an anatomical preparation of a human skull.

But why would Stewart and his medical brethren take a photograph like this? Why would they pose with a cadaver seemingly in the midst of rebirth/birthing its own skeleton? Once reborn, unburdened by skin, muscle, and membrane – all since mangled and mutilated by Stewart's clumsy hands – was the idea to have the reanimated bones walk around campus; to ponder fleshless existence amidst a swarm of scalpel-wielding students? Indeed, what a spectacle that would be.