By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Roberta Corson recalled her father’s dissection lab as a happy place.
Her father, David L. Bassett, was an expert in anatomy and dissection at the University of Washington. For more than 17 years, he was engaged in creating what has been called the most painstaking and detailed set of images of the human body, inside and out, ever produced. In 3-D.
Working closely with William Gruber, the inventor of the View-Master, the three-dimensional viewing system that GAF Corporation popularized as a toy in the 1960s, Dr. Bassett created the 25- volume “Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy” in 1962. It included about 1,500 pairs of slides, along with line drawings that made the details more discernible. The paired slides could be examined with a View-Master, making the chest cavity look cavernous, and making details of structure and tissue stand out unforgettably.
The atlas was an immediate success and the images became an important resource for medical students . But the atlas eventually went out of publication in the 1960s.
Thanks to Stanford University’s school of medicine, however, the work will soon be available to the world. The school is bringing the images online.
The school has also worked with eHuman, a company in the nearby Silicon Valley that hopes to charge students and the curious for access to the trove. Rolling a computer mouse over an image at the eHuman site will highlight anatomical details, and bring up the line drawings from the atlas. So far access to the head and neck collection is $8 a month. Nothing else is online yet.
Even without the stereoscopic boost, the images are stunning . Blood vessels cluster in a tangle along a spinal column, and pelvic bones stand out like butterflies against a stark black field. The back of a man’s head, its layers of flesh and bone sliced away, shows the excavation from the scalp down to the brain as if looking at a stratified canyon wall. The original Kodachrome slides, carefully preserved, still provide images of tremendous clarity.


ATLAS OF ANATOMY Images of the human body made in the 1960s by David L. Bassett and William Gruber include, above, the spine; right, the head; and below, the kidneys. Stanford University in California is putting theimages online.

Dr. Bassett’s widow, Lucille Bassett, gave the collection to Stanford in her will. Eventually, it will be possible to see the images online in stereo for anyone who owns the increasingly popular eyeglasses that provide a sense of three-dimensional depth in video games, said Robert Austrian, eHuman’s chief executive. The devices have rapid electronic shutters that provide the optical illusion of three dimensions when each eye is fed a different perspective.
Mrs. Corson provided notes from her mother’s unpublished memoir, in which she said that before Mr. Gruber approached her husband about creating a stereoscopic atlas, a similar project intended just to produce two-dimensional images had been attempted at the University of California.
An anatomist “tried to work on unembalmed bodies of prisoners who had been executed.” The result, she wrote, “was a crude and bloody mess.”
By using embalmed bodies, Dr. Bassett and Mr. Gruber reasoned, they could work with better preserved tissues. Dr. Bassett had devised his own embalming fluid that would retain “near normal color” of the tissue, Mrs. Bassett wrote.
Her husband began the great work of his life with the head and neck; Mrs. Corson was 3 years old at the time. (She is now 64.) “I certainly grew up around bodies, and his dissections,” she said - along with her three brothers. She recalled: “There was nothing gross or ugly about it. It was beautiful.”
For all his knowledge, Mrs. Corson said, her father, who died in 1966 at age 52, retained a sense of “amazement and wonder” at the complexity of the bodies he deconstructed.
Once, she recalled, he held up his hand and turned it over before her. “I know every muscle,” he told her. “I know ever nerve and every vessel in the hand. But there’s so much I will never know.”