Never before had an artist portrayed anatomy so frankly and ruthlessly. The intense, sometimes harsh colours of blood and flesh intensify the "lifelike" quality of the opened corpse. It seems to have become an object, provided for purposes of study - and thus a motif made available for pictorial representation.

This is also described by a surgeon, Oskar Boeckl, the artist's son: "The opened corpse is not only a useless, decaying heap of flesh, not only nature's exploited store of spare parts, not only an irrefutable and conspicuous protest against a technicised civilisation, but also hope for the living through knowledge. Nowhere else is the does the encounter between natural science and art give such cause for reflection."