A companion photo essay is featured here.

If you’re a doctor who uses his skills to preserve corpses with a special polymer, then displays them skinless before millions as “The Skateboarder,” “The Yoga Lady,” and in other whimsical poses, you’re bound to raise some hackles. One recent example: when Dr. Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibition, as it’s called, disembarked in Manchester, England, earlier this year, the Bishop of Manchester Nigel McCulloch condemned it as “a kind of freaky horror show,” telling the BBC, “It’s really important that you treat the human body with a great deal of respect.”

But after 13 years of stirring up controversy as he tours with the Body Worlds brand—and it is a brand, with at least four concurrent exhibitions around the world at press time—von Hagens, who earned his medical degree at the University of Lübeck in Germany in 1973, is used to such denunciations. That the criticism doesn’t seem to be hurting ticket sales any, and in fact may be helping, must serve as some consolation. The shows have attracted some 25 million visitors globally—more than any other traveling exhibition—since the first one in 1995.

In the end, all the flak seems only to reinforce the 63-year-old’s resolve to make the shows what he terms “places of enlightenment and contemplation, even of philosophical and religious self-recognition.” His work displays nothing but respect for the human body, he typically counters, saying that it honors the great artists and anatomists of the Renaissance. For the record, he makes clear that his cadavers all come from donors who wanted to end up in Body Worlds, where tickets go for $18.95 a pop. All the fuss, he maintains, comes from an unfortunate, if understandable, place. People “don’t ever want to think about their own deaths or that of their loved ones,” says von Hagens. “Body Worlds inserts the post-mortal into the cultural landscape and everyday conversation. It’s more than some people can bear.”

It’s pretty much universally agreed that death, even if it comes gently at an advanced age, is a bummer. But does an encounter with von Hagens’ real human specimens—usually some 200 per exhibit—help, as von Hagens has suggested, to ease some of the anxiety about where we’re all ultimately headed? At the March opening of Body Worlds 3 at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, visitors strolling among “The Hurdler,” “The Archer,” “The Trapeze Artist,” and other posed corpses seem no less willing to ponder their final hour. “I never really think about it,” says Los Angeles resident Connie Graham, 71, echoing the comments of others.

But the latest show, which focuses on using the displayed bodies and organs to underscore the marvelous complexity of the human cardiovascular system, does seem to succeed in educating the public toward more healthful lifestyles. In one display, a cross section of a normal adult aorta—smooth and straight like a garden hose—contrasts with another cross section of the same artery, only this one is bumpy and gnarled by arteriosclerosis. Surprising factoids (during an average lifetime, the heart pumps 1 million barrels of blood, or enough to fill up more than three supertankers) are plastered throughout the exhibit. “It’s just amazing that your heart, the size of a fist, can give blood to the whole body,” says Rosie Chavez, a 25-year-old retail manager from Los Angeles. Just in case exhibition-goers want to make sure everything is working properly, there’s a blood pressure monitor in one of the exhibit halls for anyone to use.