Medical Students with Cadavers, 1918, photograph. Bowdoin College Archives.
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Historians contextualize these photographs as a professional coming-of-age narrative for medical students, since dissection was a communal rite of passage at the turn of the 20th century. It is hard to not consider the ethical and moral implications of posing with unnamed and unknown human bodies—these photographs offer us a visceral view into the mindset within medical education prior to the objectivity and detachment promoted by the Flexner Report.