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Last weekend I attended an allegedly controversial show at the Expo convention centre. It was the Body Worlds program, billed as ``the anatomical exhibition of real human bodies.'' The exhibition is of human corpses, preserved by ``plastination,'' a process developed by Body Worlds founder Doctor Gunther von Hagens in 1978. The process replaces body fluids and fats with resin, silicone rubber, and polyesters, preserving it indefinitely and making the body's organs look like the imitation leather seats from a 1982 Grand Marquis.
The exhibition featured many bodies, some whole, some sliced open, some disassembled into small pieces showing just a heart, or femur, or other subsystem. It was feared before it opened that the show would be too graphic, and public authorities debated placing age requirements on attendance. In the end they just placed a warning outside the show that some of the exhibits were graphic, and set off an enclosed area at the far end where people could sit and recuperate.
The question to my mind is: is this exhibitionism? Granted there is some educational value to it; biology textbooks tend to separate the systems of the body so that each exists in its own universe and one never sees them integrated, and Visible Body-type models tend to give an abstract version of anatomy, without the sloppiness and variations of real bodies.
But it's difficult to not feel depressed by being in a room with dozens of dead bodies, and when a pack of teenagers peeks at a set of tumorous organs and goes ``eww'' and giggles nervously it's also difficult not to feel that what you're there for isn't learning; it's to see if you can look at horrible things and take it. (The corpses, I note, are all of volunteers, who felt the exhibit was a useful contribution to science and education. Many were also organ donors. But necessarily they are then bodies of people who died of old age, or who died of illnesses, some of them birth defects.)
Some of the displays achieve the status of art. The Body Worlds publicity likes to point out a figure posed at a chess board, so one can see the muscles and nerves and skeleton of a person actually doing a normal activity. There are similar figures fully or partly disassembled in the act of fencing, or pole-vaulting, or hanging from gymnastic rings. The most striking of these to my eye was a runner whose skeleton was posed next to his muscular system. Another row compellingly displayed just the circulatory system for a human leg, next to that of a chicken and of a rabbit, figures traced out by a red ribbon suspended in midair.
What to make of it? After a few days thinking it over I'm less certain.
Trivia: At the close of his 1933-34 performing tour of the Soviet Union, Harpo Marx was called upon by the State Department to sneak a packet of letters back to the United States. Harpo told his Soviet observer that he was a spy and was smuggling the designs for the Ford tractor out of Russia. Source: Harpo Speaks!, Harpo Marx and Rowland Barber.
Currently reading: The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill.
The exhibition featured many bodies, some whole, some sliced open, some disassembled into small pieces showing just a heart, or femur, or other subsystem. It was feared before it opened that the show would be too graphic, and public authorities debated placing age requirements on attendance. In the end they just placed a warning outside the show that some of the exhibits were graphic, and set off an enclosed area at the far end where people could sit and recuperate.
The question to my mind is: is this exhibitionism? Granted there is some educational value to it; biology textbooks tend to separate the systems of the body so that each exists in its own universe and one never sees them integrated, and Visible Body-type models tend to give an abstract version of anatomy, without the sloppiness and variations of real bodies.
But it's difficult to not feel depressed by being in a room with dozens of dead bodies, and when a pack of teenagers peeks at a set of tumorous organs and goes ``eww'' and giggles nervously it's also difficult not to feel that what you're there for isn't learning; it's to see if you can look at horrible things and take it. (The corpses, I note, are all of volunteers, who felt the exhibit was a useful contribution to science and education. Many were also organ donors. But necessarily they are then bodies of people who died of old age, or who died of illnesses, some of them birth defects.)
Some of the displays achieve the status of art. The Body Worlds publicity likes to point out a figure posed at a chess board, so one can see the muscles and nerves and skeleton of a person actually doing a normal activity. There are similar figures fully or partly disassembled in the act of fencing, or pole-vaulting, or hanging from gymnastic rings. The most striking of these to my eye was a runner whose skeleton was posed next to his muscular system. Another row compellingly displayed just the circulatory system for a human leg, next to that of a chicken and of a rabbit, figures traced out by a red ribbon suspended in midair.
What to make of it? After a few days thinking it over I'm less certain.
Trivia: At the close of his 1933-34 performing tour of the Soviet Union, Harpo Marx was called upon by the State Department to sneak a packet of letters back to the United States. Harpo told his Soviet observer that he was a spy and was smuggling the designs for the Ford tractor out of Russia. Source: Harpo Speaks!, Harpo Marx and Rowland Barber.
Currently reading: The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-29 01:15 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-01-30 01:53 pm (UTC)Overall - and I admit to not having visited, as I'm quite happy knowing all this is inside me, and want it to remain thus.. I could never conceivably be a surgeon - I'd probably have to agree with you, in that it's present a little more for the shock value than its educational worth, although the latter's surely not lacking, even if in a more artistic than biological sense.
Of course, there's always the famous "visible humans" at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, with - as I recall - one man and one woman, presented in thin slices. (One back to front, one side to side, I think, but it's been a few years)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-01 08:00 am (UTC)Those are mostly the sentiments I've settled on. The one nagging doubt in my mind is related to my passion for explaining things: unquestionably, bodies preserved like this are of value to biologists, biochemists, doctors, and surgeons. Although one can learn much about how the body works -- and how it gets diseases -- by books and photographs, the ability to see it in real life and poke around is important.
And if it's worthwhile for specialists to learn this by examining corpses, isn't it worth something for the layman to at least see them?
I've known from almost as far back as I can remember that smoking is horrible and it pollutes the lungs; but this was the first time I saw a smoker's lung, a horrible muddy brown puddle tucked between the lungs. Granted I didn't need more help to avoid smoking; but somebody who's been to that exhibit has been scared out by it.
And I knew abstractly, about the horrible fate coal miners have in their lungs. I didn't know a lifetime of breathing coal dust could provide lungs that look themselves like lumps of coal, horrible and glistening in the light.
I suppose the educational impact was less for me because I have picked up a good amount of anatomy despite not really studying it; so phenomena like mirrored people -- who actually have their organs reversed left-to-right -- were no surprise to me. Similarly the look of a cholesterol-blocked artery wasn't a surprise. Even if they'd displayed some chimeric people (people who have different genetic material in different parts of their bodies -- a rare but not unknown trait already messing up paternity cases throughout the court system) I wouldn't have been surprised by that. Other people certainly would have had their eyes opened by the incredible traits of ordinary human bodies, several times over, though.
The organizers seem reasonably sincere in claiming that they want to bring anatomy to the masses; in a generous mood I can even believe they mean it. And then I notice on their flyer that their sponsors were Channel NewsAsia, Today newspaper, and the Singapore Tourism Board.