When James Chang was a surgical resident at Stanford Medical School, he liked to visit the sculpture garden at the nearby Cantor Arts Center. The museum happens to have one of the world's best collections of work by Auguste Rodin, including a giant bronze cast of The Gates of Hell. Following his two young daughters around as they ran through the garden, it dawned on him that the hands on some of Rodin's sculptures looked very similar to the deformed and injured hands he was learning to operate on. "I started playing a mental game, trying to catalog the different clinical conditions," said Chang.

Chang's fascination with Rodin's hands has led to a new exhibit at the museum that features the original bronze sculptures alongside digital reconstructions of the bones, nerves, and blood vessels of real patients treated by Chang, who's now a professor of surgery at Stanford specializing in hand surgery and reconstruction. Visitors will be able to hold an iPad up to several hand sculptures and see the underlying anatomy from different angles.

"I want the doctors to walk across the street and appreciate the artistic beauty of the hands, and I want the public to see what's inside," Chang said.

Other hand sculptures in the exhibit will be accompanied by before and after surgery photos of patients with conditions that deform the hand in similar ways, including Dupuytrens contracture, Apert syndrome, and Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease.

Some of the text describing these displays comes from undergraduates who took a course Chang teaches each year, in which students pick one of Rodin's hands, diagnose the problem, and develop a surgical plan to correct it. The course is extremely popular, and Chang says he's been fascinated by the reasons students are drawn to it. "One woman was a butcher's daughter, one was the organist for the Stanford Chapel," he said. "I had a baseball player from Stanford who was interested in the mechanics of grip, and a student who was partially paralyzed and wanted to learn more about his condition."

It's not clear whether Rodin knew that many of the hands he modeled matched particular clinical conditions, says Bernard Barryte, the museum's curator of European art. But Barryte suspects that even if Rodin knew, he didn't particularly care. All of the sculptor's work was calculated to communicate emotion and elicit empathy, and he recognized that hands are particularly expressive, Barryte says. "He modeled interesting hands when he saw them, building up a sort of library or archive of appendages that he could use as the need arose."

Although the hands in the new exhibit were selected because of their resemblance to clinical deformities, Barryte notes that many other hands sculpted by Rodin were not deformed by medical conditions but by the rigors of 19th century life. "They belonged to men he met as he walked though the streets of Paris, that is to say that they are simply powerful, working hands, the hands of men engaged in tough manual labor, the appearance of which is likely to be unfamiliar to many of us."

The exhibit opens April 9 and runs through August 23. If you can't make it to campus, the images in this gallery will give you an idea of what you're missing.