Meet Susan Potter: Immortal Corpse

At the age of 72, German immigrant Susan Potter was adamant about donating her body to science. Her body would be turned inside out and created into a 3D digital landscape of 6,900 photos for medical students to learn from. In 2015, her wish finally came true. In a  storyforNational Geographic, journalist Cathy Newman details Potter ’s journey from living human to “immortal corpse.”Potter ’s body was donated to the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project, a program started by Vic Spitzer and David Whitlock at the University of Colorado in 1991. At the time, they received a government contract grant to spearhead “data representing a complete normal adult human male and female…from cryo-sectioning…cadavers.” Until Potter came along, the project had studied two cadavers: one 39-year-old male death row inmate and a 59-year-old woman who died from heart disease. The male was sectioned into approximately 2,000 slices that were a millimeter thick, and the fema le was sliced into 5,000 pieces that were .33 millimeter big.Potter didn ’t just want her body to be studied for pure anatomical purposes; her personality, experiences, and traumas needed to be heard in order to fully understand her body’s narrative. Spitzer spent a lot of time with Potter — showing her the bowls for the polyvinyl alcohol that would prepare her bod y to be ground up and imaged. She also underwent sonograms and MRI so that Spitzer and his time could get a full analysis of h...
Source: radRounds - Category: Radiology Authors: Source Type: blogs