The Visible Human Project®:: A resource for education

Throughout recorded history, the relationship between biological structure and function have been central to the understanding of health and disease. For many centuries, the anatomy illustrations originally created during the medieval period formed the basis for the study of medicine. But learning and understanding anatomic structures is limited by the fundamentally two-dimensional images traditionally used to teach them. The digital computer now allows scientists to acquire, store, manipulate, and display complex images. In 1989, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) began a project to use computer technologies to build a prototype digital image human male and female, the Visible Human Project (VHP), the digital images currently available in the VHP database, ongoing research and development, and plans for the future of the VHP.