Ronald Bergman, Ph.D.

While he's not quite old enough to have met the ancient anatomists that he's fond of quoting, Ron Bergman is well acquainted with their methods and their findings.

Since retiring from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in 1997, Dr. Bergman has published four outstanding anatomy textbooks, available exclusively on the Web through Virtual Hospital.

His magnum opus is the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Human Anatomic Variation. Dr. Bergman calls it a work in progress, as he continues to pore over the contemporary and classic literature of anatomy, reading a half dozen languages in his effort to trace the hundreds of variations that can take place in the human anatomy.

His Atlas of Human Anatomy in Cross Section is a one-of-a-kind on the Web. It was first published as a traditional textbook in the early 1990s, and as the Web evolved, Dr. Bergman saw the merit of putting this kind of resource in the hands of physicians, anatomists, and other health care works by way of the Web. Working with a team of anatomists and photo staff, Dr. Bergman presided over the daily preparation of a 1 cm. slice of human tissue, cut cross-sectionally through a frozen cadaver. Then, from the photo proofs and the tissue specimen, he and his colleagues painstakingly labeled each identifiable part.

Bergman and his colleagues focused on the needs of anatomy students immersed in the understanding of anatomy at a microscopic level and produced Atlas of Microscopic Anatomy: A Functional Approach.

Finally, the ever-resourceful professor felt that Virtual Hospital should have a traditional anatomy atlas, illustrated in a classic style. Dr. Bergman discovered one, much to his liking, that remains a mystery in terms of who in the 19th century commissioned it, illustrated it, and published it. Dr. Bergman's Atlas of Human Anatomy, translated from the original German, communicates to a broad audience the subtleties of human anatomy. Working with staff from Virtual Hospital, Dr. Bergman has taken advantage of the multi-media nature of the Web to produce a useful study tool that squeezes a maximum of information from the exquisite original illustrations

Readers will note that a constant collaborator with Dr. Bergman on these texts is Adel K. Afifi, M.D., M.S., who holds joint appointments as professor in the departments of Pediatrics, Anatomy and Cell Biology, and Neurology.

Dr. Bergman has taught anatomy for nearly half a century. He holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois and was a fellow at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Before joining the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine faculty in 1980, he held a faculty appointment at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School and the American University of Beirut.

Always the teacher, Dr. Bergman continues to reach new generations of students through his Virtual Hospital web pages, and takes great delight in the numbers of users of his on-line textbooks.

All contents copyright © 1992-2004 the Author(s) and The University of Iowa. All rights reserved.

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