Originally published at: The Visible Human Project is a detailed collection of cross-sectional photographs of the human body | Boing Boing
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long before Body Worlds Exhibits existed, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago had a series of acrylic panels that contained a human that was sliced up like this but in thicker pieces and Head to Toe.
It was located in a stairwell. If I recall correctly an earlier version of the exhibit allowed you to move the layers like pages in a book. It was super creepy because it was a real human.
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A real slice of life.
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That’s some really lovely marbling. 
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That is sinisterly humorous 
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well that’s not problematic at all
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When I die, they’re going to get this.
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Found another example of a human that wasn’t visible in the original post…
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To obtain these images, the body of an executed murderer was embedded in gelatin,…
Great.
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I remember when these images first became available on the Internet in the mid-nineties. It was one of the first really amazing things to be available on the web. You used to be able to get the whole dataset on a CD-ROM. I wonder if my dad still has that someplace.
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I have MRI scans like that, only in B&W, of my legs. Only its full of tumors on the left one 
Looks like a drippy wax candle.
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Yeah, I remember someone once produced a “virtual colonoscopy” movie from the data. Someone else was able to reconstruct the skin - you can see his tattoo.
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We were excited to use this dataset at my company! Our products were high speed data recording systems, either to tape or RAID - something terribly boring at trade shows. We wanted something more interesting to show. At the time, HDTV wasn’t available yet and computer video was very low resolution. We put The Visible Human running on a loop and it drew a lot of attention – seeing something that detailed (I think we did it at 1600x1200), playing at such a high frame rate was novel.
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your username makes the comment!
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I guess an execution is one of the few circumstances in which one can obtain timely access to an otherwise healthy, undamaged body. Still ethically dicey though.
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Apparently the prison chaplain convinced the man to donate his body to science before he was executed. I’m not sure this was what he had in mind, but I guess it counts as consent.
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