Virtual Anatomy & Physiology Guide: Provenance Statement

Provenance Statement for Bodies Utilized in the Anatomage Table

Prepared by Dominic Hall

Manager, Curation and Stewardship, Anatomy and Artifact Collections

Harvard Medical School | Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library

The Anatomage Table was designed and built by Anatomage, Inc., a for-profit company based in San Jose, California in the United States of America.

According to Anatomage, Inc., the images of the four human subjects available for anatomical dissection on the Anatomage Table were licensed from the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project (United States of America) and the Visible Korean Human (Republic of Korea).

The Visible Human Project (VHP) is a public-domain library of cross-sectional anatomical, MRI, and CT images sourced from male and female Caucasian bodies. The male subject is Joseph Paul Jernigan, a 39-year-old man convicted of murder and executed by lethal injection in Texas in 1993. Reportedly, after consultation with a prison chaplain, Jernigan consented to will his body to the Texas State Anatomical Board for scientific education, from which it was then transferred to the VHP.

The VHP’s 59-year-old female subject died of a heart attack in 1993 and willed her body to the Maryland State Anatomical Board. Unlike the VHP’s male subject, she has remained anonymous, although she is often described in the scientific and popular literature as a housewife from Maryland. Reportedly, her husband requested that her remains be part of the VHP. The data sets for the male and female subjects were made public in 1994 and 1995, respectively. The University of Colorado Health Science Center conducted the preparatory and imaging work for the project.

The Visible Korean Human (VKH), inspired by the VHP and designed to be an improvement on that initial effort, was started in 2000 at Ajou University, Suwon, Republic of Korea. Images of the male subject were released in 2002, and those of the female subject were released in 2010. The male subject was 33 years old when he died of leukemia in 2001. The 26-year female subject died of stomach cancer with lymph node metastases. Both the male and female subjects donated their remains to scientific research.

The origins of the remains in the prosection and histological images used on the Anatomage Table are, at present, unknown.

Medical knowledge has a history, and it is critical that medical professionals reflect upon the origins of that knowledge when using it to further medical science and clinical practice.

Mount Sinai thanks Mr. Hall for generously allowing us to share his research on the Anatomage table.

More information on both the VHP and VKH can be found in the following sources.

Visible Human Project (VHP)

• Ackerman, M. “The Visible Human Project.” Academic Medicine 74, no. 6 (1999): 667-70.
• Dowling, Claudia Glenn. “The Visible Man: The Execution and Afterlife of Joseph Paul Jernigan.” Life 20, no. 2 (1997): 40.
• Hildebrandt, S. “Capital Punishment and Anatomy: History and Ethics of an Ongoing Association.” Clinical Anatomy 21, no.1 (2008): 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1002/ca.20571.
• National Library of Medicine. “The Visible Human Project.” Accessed July 28, 2021. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visiblehuman.html.
• Spitzer, Victor M., M. J. Ackerman, Ann. L. Scherzinger, and Whitlock, D. “The Visible Human Male: a Technical Report.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 3, no.2 (1996): 118–30. https://doi.org/10.1136/jamia.1996.96236280.
• Spitzer, Victor M. and Ann L. Scherzinger. “Virtual Anatomy: An Anatomist's Playground.” Clinical Anatomy 19, no. 3 (2006): 192–203. https://doi.org/10.1002/ca.20330.
• Spitzer, Victor M. and David G. Whitlock, David G. “The Visible Human Dataset: The Anatomical Platform for Human Simulation.” The Anatomical Record 253, no.2 (1998): 49–57. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0185(199804)253:23.0.CO;2-9.
• Waldby, Cathy. The Visible Human Project : Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. London; New York: Routledge, 2000.

Visible Korean Human (VKH)

• Dai, Jing-Xing, Min Suk Chung, Rong-Mei Qu, Lin Yuan, Shu-Wei Liu, and Dong Sun Shin. “The Visible Human Projects in Korea and China with Improved Images and Diverse Applications.” Surgical and Radiologic Anatomy (English Ed.) 34, no.6 (2012): 527–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00276-012-0945-8.
• Kim, Jin Yong, Min Suk Chung, Woo Sup Hwang, Jin Seo Park, and Hyung-Seon Park. 2002. “Visible Korean Human: Another Trial for Making Serially-Sectioned Images.” Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 85 (2002): 228–33.
• Kwon, Koojoo, Dong Sun Shin, Byeong-Seok Shin, Hyung Seon Park, Sangho Lee, Hae Gwon Jang, Jin Seo Park, and Min Suk Chung. “Virtual Endoscopic and Laparoscopic Exploration of Stomach Wall Based on a Cadaver's Sectioned Images.” Journal of Korean Medical Science 30, no.5 (2015): 658–61. https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2015.30.5.658.
• Park, Jin Seo, Min Suk Chung, Sung Bae Hwang, Y. S. Lee, D. H. Har, and Hyung Seon Park. “Visible Korean Human: Improved Serially Sectioned Images of the Entire Body.” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 24, no.3 (2005): 352–60. https://doi.org/10.1109/TMI.2004.842454.
• Park, Jin Seo, Min Suk Chung, Sung Bae Hwang, Byeong-Seok Shin, and Hyung Seon Park. “Visible Korean Human: Its Techniques and Applications.” Clinical Anatomy (New York, N.Y.) 19, no3 (2006): 216–24. https://doi.org/10.1002/ca.20275.