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Physicians, rather like diplomats, must be on familiar terms with both human states in order to be effective partisans of either. Doctors must go places we'd ourselves like to avoid. They must keep a certain confidential manner. Tempted as we may be to view the history of medicine as a story of advancement from brute savagery to HMO-facilitated immortality, the evidence left behind over the past millennium -- textbooks, scalpels and apothecary jars -- suggests, rather, the pains physicians have invariably taken to conceal from their patients what they can't help but acknowledge among themselves: the morbid neutrality of their trade.

Then along comes the Duke University Medical Center with what looks to be a scholarly exhibition, but in fact is an act of high treason. The curators have innocuously titled it "The Physician's Art," and published on the occasion a book-length catalog handsome enough to mingle on a coffee table with the likes of Vanity Fair.

Physician's Portfolio A gallery of images. (Click to display images in a new browser window. Best viewed with browsers higher than 3.0) The Physician's Art: Representations of Art and Medicine By Julie V. Hansen and Suzanne Porter Duke University Press Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

But don't be misled by the matte satin stock. By collecting in one place medical-school mannequins and gross anatomy primers and the tools and tinctures with which the machinery of health has been primed ever since Andreas Vesalius first put blade to cadaver in the 16th century, the exhibition and catalog open up a whole doctor's bag of questions about the compromises the physician must strike between life and death if he's to maintain free passage across the pathways of medicine.

As straightforward as medicine may seem to the patient -- merely something to be bottled and swallowed -- the doctor engaged in the art of diagnosis and treatment must at every turn consider a whole history of trial and error.

Obviously, the dead play a crucial role in medical practice: Doctors look to the cadaver for knowledge (pathology) and patients rely on the deceased for spare parts (transplants). What becomes apparent in "The Physician's Art," though, is the ambivalence with which the physician must treat the barrier we like to think separates us from our corpses: To view the imagery with which doctors have historically shared their wisdom with one another and to compare it to that revealed to patients is to see that, confident as their diagnoses may be, for physicians the real distinction between life and death is one of degree, not kind.

It's a viewpoint that lies at the very foundation of modern medicine. In the first place, there's Vesalius himself, who single-handedly toppled 1,200 years of conventional wisdom about the human body when, at the age of 29, he published "De humani corporis fabrica." His 1543 treatise stood apart from all anatomy books that preceded it because his knowledge came from the dissection table rather than the ancient Greeks.

Next page | Like nudists, the dead have a lesson to teach