The VisualMD

This is a great video clip highlighting Alexander Tsiaras and his work creating beautiful educational videos and interactives from real medical data. Beginning with a New York based company called Anatomical Travelogue, Tsiaras now has branched off and created TheVisualMD, an online database of interactives and articles for the medical education of the general public. He has also published several books, two of which live on my reference shelf: The Invision Guide to a Healthy Heart and The Invision Guide to Lifeblood. The images are really beautiful and I especially love how he takes real photographs and superimposes actual medical data on top to show relationships between the internal body and what you see happening on the outside.  Everything he uses is from real data; nothing is made up or the consequence of artistic license. Here are just a few examples of some of his work:

www.hurriyetusa,com 

Alexander Tsiaras, Anatomical Travelogue and TheVisualMD

Alexander Tsiaras, Anatomical Travelogue 

And for an interesting comparison, take a look at this modern image by Alexander Tsiaras (from his book "The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman") constrasted with a piece done in 1774 by Jan van Rymsdyk entitled "The Anatomy of a Human Gravid Uterus":

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www.medgadget.com (Tsiaras)

National Library of Medicine (Rymsdyk)

  

www.medgadget.com 

Alexander Tsiaras, from"The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman"

In an attempt to find an article on horse anatomy and conformation that I had read a few months ago, I happened to stumble across these illustrations by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by accident. They come from a book entitled A Comparative view of the Human and Animal Frame which was published in 1860 and which has now been scanned into a web collection by the University of Wisconsin. I was most interested in the two images involving the horse, shown below, but there are many other interesting illustrations including some comparing humans to elephants, lions, antelope and bears within the collection.

 Source: University of Wisconsin Digital Collections

http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/HistSciTech.CompAnat 

Of course, browsing through that collection led me to another wonderful find as the University also has a great collection of veterinary illustrations by Hermann Dittrich, a German medical/veterinary illustrator from the early 1900s who I've admired for quite awhile (after all, veterinary illustration is one of my interests). A few of my favorites are shown below but it is definitely worth browsing through the entire collection, especially for anyone interested in veterinary illustration. In addition to the horse, the collection includes illustrations of cows, dogs, lions and deer in some of the most detailed and beautiful veterinary illustrations I've seen (click on the images to view larger).

Source: University of Wisconsin Digital Collections

http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Science.VetAnatImgs