Memento Mori

Students posing with skeletons was not uncommon at medical schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here Dartmouth Medical School graduates from the class of 1889 pose for one such graduation portrait. What we may find grossly inappropriate was fairly common until 1930, when medical education became more objective and detached, thus ending a period in which students actually bonded with the skeletons—and cadavers—they worked on. The photographs, say the authors of last year's Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage inAmerican Medicine 1880-1930, were part of a "professional coming-of-age narrative."