How a Woman's Donated Body Became a Digital Cadaver | National Geographic

I'm not afraid of death. This is a healer; this can be a friend. When you're in constant agonizing pain, when you put me on your meat table, you would be shocked because I have read all the words running across my body from my head to my toes, wiggling tracks from surgeries. I really didn't care anymore if I went on one more day, and then the visible human came along, and I said maybe God wants me to do another project. I think I've left enough of a heritage behind that there will be enough to remember by. My spirit will live on; my soul will live on. My physical body belongs to Dr. Spitzer.

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I take care of the dead. I'm not a health care provider; I'm a trained PhD in physical chemistry, and my background was in physics and math. So, I had no relationship whatsoever to biology. I came to the University of Colorado in 1977, and at that point in time, the anatomy department was quite interested in creating information with the human body cadavers, the way anatomists teach. So, they hired me to try and develop this expertise. I hadn't developed any particular love for any piece of anatomy; I loved the human body; it's just fascinating, and I didn't know much about it.

I like to describe Vik; he's kind of a mad scientist kind of guy. He's got all these brilliant ideas, and he's passionate about everything, and Vik just does whatever he wants. I mean, ultimately, that's how he's able to do such impressive projects. The visible human project was designed by the National Library of Medicine. The primary goal was education. In the old days, if you wanted to develop three-dimensional anatomy of the human body for purposes of teaching students, the technique was basically to section the body into slabs. When Vik appeared on the scene with his expertise in computer technology, it was like manna from heaven.

We wanted to take photographic slices through a person's body, and you can't photograph the inside with visible light unless it's a cadaver. The visible human dissectors, that's the original body that we sliced, that software's used a lot in medical schools, and it's mainly a way to teach Anatomy in a 3D space. This was done in the 90s. In order to get really thin slices, the only way we knew how to do it was to freeze it, coated with polyvinyl alcohol to protect from freezer burn.

Then you couldn't section the body into four blocks, each less than 20 inches. After that, we'd process each block by turning it into literally a block by surrounding it in PVA or plastic, and then we take off one millimeter at a time of that block and take a picture of the remainder of the block. So, once we have the section of the specimen that we want to cut, we have a circular blade that rotates, and the blade moves down incrementally on that specimen.

To the naked eye, you can't see the difference, but after seven days, you made it through an entire body. The grinding or shaving process is a lot like an industrial-sized sanding. If you were to take an electric sander and stay on the surface of wood and then take a picture, and then sand it again, take a picture, those tiny changes that start to occur, that's what we're capturing all the way through this body. We end up taking a lot of photographs, something like 20,000 pictures. Then we digitally align those up so that as you scroll through, you can move from head to toe through the entire body.

Dealing with cadavers and donations of people's bodies to medical education has been going on for a long time. Susan Potter is quite different, and I don't think you know why yet. We did a member in our presence today; you may have noticed her; she's in a wheelchair. Let me be very straightforward about this; she wants to be hated. She had a newspaper article, Rocky Mountain News, that described the visible human in great detail, and that's what made her want to be part of this kind of educational process for medical students.

It's easy to write a prescription; it's easy to give an injection or to take you to the surgery and cut you up. That's all easy; there's more to it than that, and that is my project through the invisible disability woman to bring information and teaching to the medical profession, to the entire healthcare profession. She rolled into the reception area in the center for human simulation and she said, “I want to be part of this,” very emphatically, and told me about her diseases and her history.

I said, “Well, you're a walking pathology specimen, not an Anatomy specimen. We're trying to teach normal, and you're not normal.” She wouldn't quit; she just kept saying, “I want to do this.” And I thought about something I'd seen earlier about someone that was dead talking to you. I said, “If you will let us record your life for the next year, then I will commit to doing this.” We didn't know it was going to be 12 years.

Last fifty years, two different elements of society, but most recently, you made a decision to donate not just your life. I have always felt that there is a lot to be learned in medicine in society, and if I could be a small part of it, having been involved with hospitals and children, that my body was always ready for donation. What she really wanted was to be helpful to medical students, to people learning Anatomy.

She really wanted those students to understand compassion, so she was happy to talk about compassion in healthcare while she was living. It is not just liver with a gallbladder or the stomach, but it is the whole being that is being dealt with. And as far as I'm concerned, there is not enough education going on in the medical school or nursing schools or anywhere else that makes people realize that human beings need to be treated as a whole. That's what's important to me.

She knew the intimacies of sectioning a body the way we do. She actually rolled her wheelchair into the freezer and looked at the cutting system that we use. The first time I went to the Institute, and George, as I call him, Mr. Be Human, and I said, “Okay, how did he get it to be that way? Let's see what you do.” You said, “You don't want to look at it as it is.” I do. Especially if you're going to do it to me. What is the first thing you do when you get a take-off? Is liberty, and it doesn't frighten me.

You have to realize this is just your body that's going to be cut up, and if that body has served you all these years, and we won't say how well, you have done something that leaves a legacy behind. Susan passed away early in the morning; she had pneumonia, and I last saw her in University Hospital. There are processes sent out to pick up a cadaver and bring it to the state on top of a board, and that was all set in place.

I went over some time in that morning and looked at her. It was a bit emotional just saying her that that was the end of it. After that, it was my job. So, our goal here is to decide where to section, and we want to get her entire heart in the picture, and it's almost finished right there, and there it is finished. I have difficulty dealing with some aspects of cadavers, but I was trying to do things for her. She wanted this to come to a close, and there was a sense of fulfillment there when we would talk about what was happening to her in the freezer.

I wanted to make darn sure she understood, and she would oftentimes ask for a blanket. I said, “Susan, that's absurd; I'm not going to cut a blanket.” But she asked for roses. I said, "I will do that."

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That is going to go exactly to the same place where my tulips cats are; they've gone to a better world, and so rely.

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This is her patio; she had a lot of flowers on her patio. She brought plastic flowers to me constantly. She wanted my laboratory over there to look nicer. I had to give her a hug every time I left her, which I didn't wanted to do at first because I'm not a hugger, but I did because she needed it. I was happy to do it if that's what she really needed, so we were friends. Dissecting a body with a sharp scalpel sounds nicer to me than taking that same body apart with a machine, but if we really think all we are is a bunch of tissue, it shouldn't matter.

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I always during her life wanted to improve our cutting, improve our imaging. Now I've got to do what I said I would do, and that is do the best we can at imaging her because that's what I committed to. This is the most high-quality imagery taken of an entire human body that exists, and I think ultimately that's what Susan wanted—to do something revolutionary, and that's what they've done.

So, I think this project together, the two of them creating this, I think it's a huge part of who he is. This is life work, well developed, just because it's easier to teach. So here comes a lady with 26 surgeries: breast cancer, melanoma, cervical screws and wires, and a replaced hip. That's what I told her; I said, interested, but she was persistent.

We'll scroll through the cross-section to adjust what it looks like over here. Susan Potter is more than 2 terabytes of data, and we're working with the top block only and trying to process those images. Then we'll work with the three other blocks, and then there's the bigger task yet: to put the four blocks together, her images as well as her talking. That's all part of the data set, which people can see if you just ignore the rest of the data, throw away all the videotape, just look at the anatomy. There's a lot there, but when you tie it to the humanity of the videotapes and her life, I thought that would be very impactful.

In the lobby today, “Are you very, very, very positive that my body with all the screws and wires and all that stuff in it and all the bony bumps will be able to be used on you?” And I said to you, “If you can't, I would like you to tell me right now.” I said, “Well, I guess not, and in God's sake, please let me stay around a little longer.”

Along came Dr. Best Pizza and George, and I felt very much called that this was something I needed to get involved with. What were her feelings about her talking to you? When I first took, you know, human gross anatomy, I think what was always repeated by professors was that look, these are humans, and these were people, and they gave their bodies to us, so we have to be respectful.

Don't really; there's sort of a sense of immortality. Did she care about that? I honestly don't think she cared about the immortality of being up on the screen for the next 20 years and seeing every part of her body; I don't think she cared about that. But she did care about making medical education better. You're right; it's emotional. I constantly told her, “I am NOT your friend,” but I was, and she thought I was her friend, and she was my friend, but I didn't want that.

This reveals a lot to me about her life. I was accused of keeping her alive just because she was living for donating to be part of this project. I have problems with what we do; I talk about death. I don't like the idea of worms crawling in and out of my body and my body decaying and turning to dust. But we're projecting lifelike experiences on death. Logically, I have no problem with it; emotionally, I do. You don't intend to stop; our intention is to go to higher resolution, better pictures, getting this all to a process where we really could virtualize on hundred bodies. We're trying to simulate the human being.

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