Virtual Hospital: The Human Brain

January 23, 2005 6:51 PM

Virtual Hospital: The Human Brain "For the preparations used to display the spinal cord, its covering membranes, the spinal nerve roots and ganglia, we had access to the body of a newborn male infant preserved in formaldehyde solution, together with adult material that had received prolonged treatment in the same preservative solution." Don't miss the 17th century depiction of a brain dissection, and if you want to get straight to the good stuff, try GIS. (oooh clariiiice!)
posted by reflection (8 comments total)

Very interesting.
However, why stop at the brain? Take the whole tour with the Visible Human Project.

Check out the video! [mpg]
posted by toftflin at 7:31 PM on January 23, 2005

It's amazing how much we really are just bags of water and meat.
posted by Spacey at 12:06 AM on January 24, 2005

What amazes me is how much we are currently learning about the mechanisms of brain functioning, and how much we still don't know.
posted by Enron Hubbard at 4:24 AM on January 24, 2005

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." --Emerson Pugh, "The Biological Origin of Human Values"
posted by keijo at 6:54 AM on January 24, 2005

Wicked cool dissection videos from the same site
I suppose you should avoid it if you're squeamish, but there isn't anything to be squeamish about really: No faces, no skin, no blood. Also, it's your body, check out how cool it is!
posted by Popular Ethics at 7:17 AM on January 24, 2005

BRAAAAAAIIIIINNNNNNSSSSSSSS
posted by joelf at 8:22 AM on January 24, 2005

When I was in college some 20 years ago, I studied in the library a lot. There was this amazing book that I used to look at occasionally. It was a thin volume that was maybe 30 inches tall and maybe 36 wide when lying open. It was called "The Brainstem of the Cat" and had vastly enlarged cross-sections with the various tracts and nuclei labelled. Utterly fascinating, as much for its largeness as anything else.
posted by neuron at 9:06 PM on January 24, 2005

That virtual spleen operation I had didn't do a god damned thing.
posted by nanojath at 9:39 PM on February 22, 2005