They were pregnant. Some were prisoners. Others were the poorest of the poor, forgotten in death as in life. Yet dissection and depiction of their bodies have become the foundation of anatomical teaching.

Cradled in the pages of anatomy textbooks are figures stripped bare, not only of skin but of identity. Eduard Pernkopf’s infamous Nazi-era atlas contains exquisite, hyper-realistic drawings created from the bodies of political prisoners executed under Hitler’s regime.

William Hunter’s celebrated The Gravid Uterus (1774) shows dissected pregnant women with clinical detachment, their swollen wombs exposed. But who were these women? How did they end up on the dissection table? And, crucially, did they ever consent? It’s something rarely considered by educators, students and the public alike.

Today, body donation is governed by clear laws and ethics. In the UK, the 2004 Human Tissue Act (2006 in Scotland) requires informed, personal consent for anatomical investigation, and further consent to be given for production of images.

Annual memorial and thanksgiving services also honour donors, and those studying anatomy are taught to treat cadavers with the same dignity they would offer the living – the medic’s first patient, albeit silent.

But historical anatomical illustrations, still in use across education and medicine, were produced at times long before such safeguards existed. Most texts and imagery feature people who never gave permission to be dissected, let alone depicted for eternity. Should we keep using these images? Or does that make us complicit in a long history of medical exploitation?

Anatomical illustration and, therefore, the history of the peoples depicted, mirrors the legal and cultural attitudes toward dissection at the time. The first recorded human dissections occurred around 300BC in Alexandria, Egypt. In the second century, Galen, a Greek physician, dissected animals and treated gladiators, and laid the foundations for anatomical understanding in Europe for over a

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