An important moment in this process of revelation was the publication of Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica, in 1543. This book is the first publication of accurate representation of the human body without his skin. The plates of the ecorchés - the ones with no skin -, not only are accurate as they were amazing pieces of art.

It was a long way to go from Vesalius' plates to the Body Voyage screens. In this CD-ROM, published in 1997 by Time Warner, one can find an intelligent interpretation of the data compiled by the Visible Human Project - defined in the introduction of the CD-ROM as an ambitious nationwide search for an ideal physical body to study and probe in virtual reality. (2)

The project began at the University of Colorado in 1991, and its purpose was to create a unique electronic database of the body which could be used to render three dimensional images of flesh, tissue and bone (3), and then to make it available on the Internet to be visually helpful to both doctors and patients.

Lab workers used a precision planning device called Crymactotome to shave off the one-millimeter 'slice' of the body and they photographed and scanned each slice into an animation computer (4), we're informed in the Body Voyage's introduction. These scans comprised over a raw terabyte of data and the body was digitized using Computer Tomograpphy and Magnetic Resonance. The body, just for curiosity, once responded to the name of Joseph Paul Jerningan. At the time of is death, he was 39 years old. A convicted murder, Joseph Jernigan was executed by lethal injection and had donated his body to science.  (continua »»)