When photography became common in the 1880s, many medical students chose to record their medical education on film. One key aspect of that education was human dissections. A collection of these historic pictures has been published in Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine: 1880-1930 by John Warner and James Edmonson (Blast Books). Here is a selection of the most interesting images from the book.

This photo shows a common medical-student practice of the time: inscribing messages on their dissection tables. The scrawled note on this table at an unidentified school reads, "His Time was Bad, But Ours is WORSE."