body worlds

Here I discuss life and death in the context of a review of the "Body Worlds" exhibition, which is an anatomical collection of dead people designed for - and open to - the public. The increasingly famous/infamous exhibition presents the work of anatomist Prof. Gunther von Hagens. I heard much hype about von Hagens' dead bodies. When I learned that the exhibition (in London) had been extended due to demand, curiosity overwhelmed me and I went along to take a good look. Some of the exhibits troubled me - chiefly the foetuses - but I am glad I saw them as I will explain.

The Bodyworlds exhibition starts off with body parts and soon progresses to corpses presented head to toe - and literally everything in between. There are a generous number of bodies, each showing different configurations of body parts, ranging from bare skeletons to fully formed except for skin and fat. The cadavers were posed too, like actors performing their ultimate encore. A man proudly man held his skin aloft in his hand like a flag. What a difference a thin layer makes to our appearance. It would take a lot of beers for me to be attracted to a skinless woman. So beauty is skin deep and this exhibit proves it. Or does it? There is something profoundly beautiful about the skinless body. I propose that the famous saying should be corrected. Sexy is skin deep whereas beauty goes through to the bone.

There were cadavers playing basketball, swimming, pole-vaulting, fencing and even a chess player staring down at the board with his brain exposed. Another corpse was posed as a goalkeeper, but he too had a brain, so there must have been some mistake. Such dark humour fills your head when seeing these exhibits. People perceive science as a bit dry, but here there is no intellectual snobbery. The exhibition imbues humour to the presentation of some of its specimens. This worked perfectly. It is hard to explain the humour without the risk of making it sound trivial and banal. You have to see in situ the danse macabre of humour and insight, but I'll provide an example. One spectacular exhibit is a dissected man atop a huge dissected horse. All the horse's organs are astonishingly similar to ours, except they are gigantic in comparison (not least its monstrous pecker). Yet there is one very notable exception - the brain! The jockey makes this point silently yet eloquently, for he grins a skeletal grin and holds his own brain in his right hand and the horse's more diminutive brain in his left. This is a majestic, poetic way of proving that a single organ can make all the difference in the world. The profound can be conveyed using humour as surely as by any dry explanation. This surely is the key of science and of teaching in general: where possible everything should be entertaining and profound at the same time.

I learned a lot at the exhibition, gaining a myriad of little insights and revelations. I learned that many of the muscles that move the fingers are in the forearm - if the muscles were in the hands themselves then they would be too large and heavy to be dextrous.  Now I know better what a pancreas, the spleen, the sinuses and various other vaguely mysterious organs do and look like. I learned that the tubes that connect the nuts to the body are quite thick, and they hang from much higher than the pecker. Two full body slices with arms out stretched, and placed at right angles to form a strangely symbolic cross, demonstrated how our height and our arm spam are roughly the same. That was a stunning way to demonstrate a simple fact!

A couple of exhibits demonstrated the effect of smoking on the body. Not nice. Not nice at all. I mention the Body World's smoking exhibits here: Smoking Rage.

The bodies were presented with great skill, revealing different aspects of the body not just in an insightful, but also in an artistic way. I an not alone in my opinion that modern art is not as clever as it thinks it is; is more tedious that it thinks and is staggeringly talent-free, and I despise the establishment that supports this cultural decay. But the exhibits here, whilst not art per se, are truly artistic, there was obviously true skill, passion and imagination involved in presenting some of these bodies that only a master craftsman could produce. Like some of the best computer games, art in this exhibition is a pleasing emergent property of the primary raison d'etre of the object. The anatomy and the art are a duality as surely as brain and mind. They are only possible combined.

Brains were preserved here, but not minds. Maybe in a far off time, mind anatomists will preserve the minds of our distant descendants.

Nearly all the bodies were shown with the skin and fat stripped away to reveal the muscles, nerves and a cornucopia of other internal organs. Because of this I had to keep reminding myself that I was looking at real dead people. The polymerisation caused by the von Hagens' patented "plastination" process makes the bodies resemble remarkably intricate models made of plastic, and in a way, the bodies are plastic, they are high tech fossils. These are the science mummies. I can truly understand why thousands of people offer their bodies to be displayed at these exhibitions. It would be great to be a fossil used to teach, rather than a banquet for lucky creepy crawlies. Our body is our greatest asset and yet we dispose of these astonishing machines in the most destructive way.

Occasionally, for example when I saw real eye lashes on the eyelids, I would realise emotionally as well as intellectually that I was gazing at actual people. Looking at the skinless faces I kept wondering what they looked like. I yearned to see photographs of the people I examined as they were when they were alive, so I could relate to the more abstract bone and flesh. That would have been fascinating but it is very understandable why they preserve the anonymity of the bodies. Maybe in the future they will begin to show photographs of the person behind the corpse. That really would have been intriguing, in a bad taste, voyeuristic kind of way. But, let's face it - it is human to be that way. This is why the exhibition is such a success: for all the educational value, if I am typical then it appeals at least partly to our fascination in the morbid.

Some bodies are shown complete with skin - the human foetuses. They are shown from four week embryos which were barely specks, through to eight months. There was a baby girl foetus of 33 weeks. That was exactly the time that my twins spent in the womb. (The usual term for a pregnancy is 39 weeks, so you can see they were rather premature). I was present at the birth and saw the first breathing moments of our minute babies and cuddling them was astonishing and wonderful. Seeing the dead 33 weeks foetus was all the more poignant because our twins' pregnancy was made hazardous by high blood pressure. It is a fact of life that is sheltered from most of us in the developed world that some children do not make it.

I am not sure everyone would benefit from seeing the foetuses. By a coincidence, a few days before I was listening to a radio interview with a psychologist who had conducted research into the modern practice (in England in 2002) of recommending to mothers of stillborn babies to cuddle them at the birth. For some mothers this is appropriate, but the researchers discovered that for others it was the wrong thing to do. The experience detrimentally distracted the mother's attention away from their subsequent healthy children. And many mothers were left with the awful, powerful image of their dead child that hindered their recovery from he tragedy. This exhibition added a three dimensional perspective to that interview.

Other foetuses. showed birth defects including a baby with no brain or bone on the top of its head.  Siamese twins were presented locked together with only each other for company in death. Another foetus' heart formed outside its chest. These defects illustrate how much can go wrong, and does. Nature gets it right most of the time, or nobody would be here. That is the engine of evolution in action. Only reproductive mechanisms that work reliably enough can evolve further.

The most astonishing exhibit of all was a mother eight months pregnant with her womb cut away to reveal the infant within: its mother was discovered too late for it to be saved. It struck me as profound that the life-giving womb sometimes doubles as a grave.

Body Worlds offers a acknowledgement to Christianity. Along with a rather thought provoking tribute to the donors, there is a comment that Christianity is the most anatomy-friendly of all religions, that the popes of the sixteenth century sanctioned anatomy as a genuine way to better appreciate God. I am an atheist, but I too appreciate that open mindedness. I came away once again wishing that those Christians who doggedly deny evolution would desist (ironically they are mostly situated in supposedly educated America these days). To be as open minded and curious about the study of evolution today as their forebears were open minded and curious about anatomy would be a credit to the religion. Many Christians believe that evolution does not contradict the spirit of the bible. I hope that this trend continues. If Christianity could lead the world's religions with their leadership and enlightenment regarding evolution in the same way it did with anatomy, then it would be a deep credit to the church and to Christianity as a forward looking and enlightened religion.

My overall impressions of the Body Worlds exhibition are that I am delighted I went. I do not perceive it as gratuitous exploitation, or even if it is, it is justifiable as it invites us (or invited me at any rate) to confront the unthinkable. There is no snobbery, just an unforgettable and accessible presentation of anatomy and a desire to give knowledge. It made me alter my perspective on life in a positive way and most of all it is thought provoking.

An outstandingly unusual thing in an unusual exhibition is that death is not presented in a funereal way and nor is it trivialised: this isn't Disneyland. The main point is to learn about our bodies, but at the same time death is presented in a thoughtful, almost celebratory way. We see death with learning, humour, humanity and - in a paradoxical way - death is shown with an intimacy that is both disturbing and reassuring.



Body Worlds home page is www.bodyworlds.com (Opens in a new window)




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From:	MadPole	Subject:	Theatre Of Life ( part 1)	2002-07-20 05:26:31
From:	MadPole	Subject:	Theatre Of Life ( part 2)	2002-07-20 05:29:19
From:	Chris	Subject:	Temple of sinew	2002-07-22 07:23:18
From:	Rajiv Ruwala	Subject:	Disections	2003-07-19 06:48:53
From:	Jakal	Subject:	Body Worlds	2004-01-22 10:16:04
From:	Ray	Subject:	Wow.	2004-02-11 20:58:26
From:	pete	Subject:	15 million	2004-10-03 19:49:37
From:	Craig Olsen	Subject:	Evolution & Christians	2004-11-16 06:18:38
From:	Dan	Subject:	Christianity and evolution	2005-08-23 18:34:48
From:	liz	Subject:	well said	2005-10-19 04:50:17
From:	Lee Ann Napierskie	Subject:	Exhibition	2005-11-21 12:26:16
From:	Bill Burr	Subject:	The Rock	2005-11-22 13:36:22
From:	nicola	Subject:	religious beliefs	2005-12-29 17:39:33
From:	Shawn Webster	Subject:	bodyworlds	2006-02-19 07:26:27
From:	Sweta	Subject:	pregnancy exhibit	2006-02-26 06:32:12
From:	Margary	Subject:	The body exhibit	2006-09-28 21:20:07
From:	Bruce	Subject:	Intricate designs of our Creator	2008-04-29 16:27:52

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