“To resonate with the general public, anatomy must show a heightened aesthetic as well as dissection that is clear and pathology that is complex.”
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.”
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.
“Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in Western countries, but there is a lot individuals can do about it,” says Dr. Angelina Whalley, a German physician and the designer of the Body Worlds exhibitions—and also von Hagens’ wife since 1992. “Through this exhibition, we’re hoping people will see what treasure everyone is carrying around in the body.”
Von Hagens, who originally trained and practiced as an anesthesiologist, developed his unusual process for preserving bodies at the University of Heidelberg’s Institute of Anatomy in 1977 and patented it shortly thereafter. According to his website, more than 400 institutions in 40 countries now use “plastination,” as he’s christened the technique, to preserve bodies for medical study. Among the key steps are dissolving the water and soluble fats from the body with an acetone (solvent) bath and then replacing the acetone in the tissue with a special polymer through a vacuum process.
It can take up to 1,500 hours to “plastinate” a corpse—including fixing it in the desired position with wires and clamps—and up to a year to complete. Although Body Worlds has some 200 employees, von Hagens continues to do much of the work himself. Total cost per corpse? About $60,000, or six times the average cost of a funeral, if anyone is counting. All the creations are made at von Hagens’ “Plastinarium” in Guben, Germany, and are designed to last for the extra long haul, or “certainly longer than the Egyptian mummies and pharaohs,” says von Hagens, who is rarely seen in public without his black fedora hat.
But the mummy look is not what he’s going for, especially since visitor feedback from his first show in Japan more than 10 years ago told him he had to loosen up, he says. The bodies, which were not displaying movement, looked too anxious and evoked fear, he says, recalling the complaints. “I realized I had been thinking like a clinical anatomist who was trying to teach anatomy to the public in the same way I taught anatomy to medical students at the University of Heidelberg,” says von Hagens. He spent the next two years visiting anatomical museums and churches in Italy, where he noticed that Renaissance anatomists posed people with a “touch of whimsy.” Along came a new direction, leading to bodies that are positioned in everyday life situations. “To resonate with the general public, anatomy must show a heightened aesthetic as well as dissection that is clear and pathology that is complex,” he says.
As an example of some of the artistic flourishes von Hagens allows himself, “The Archer” is the body of a woman posed while taking aim with a bow and arrow—her skull is cut open and her plastinated brain is poised atop it like a beehive. The accompanying description suggests this corpse is posed to show how the sympathetic nervous system takes over when the body is under stress or active, increasing both the heartbeat and blood pressure. Meanwhile, in a pose designed to show how the kidneys’ work in regulating blood pressure, “The Trapeze Artist” is the body of a woman hanging upside down by her feet, her abdominal cavity sliced open to reveal her kidneys, abdominal aorta, and vena cava.
But it is this decision to display bodies in positions of sport and leisure—bodies gathered around a poker table, for instance—that continues to be disturbing for many. “What troubled me was that some of the bodies were posed in ways that seemed done just for entertainment or titillation, without a real educational justification,” says Hank Greely, a Stanford University law professor and biomedical ethicist who recently saw a similar Body Worlds exhibit in San Jose, California. Greely says that in all cultures, special treatment is accorded to the dead and that he wonders about the consequences for society of displaying bodies in such poses. It could “make us more callous,” he says, but adds, “Ultimately … I wouldn’t ban Body Worlds.”
Given the rather sensational nature of the exhibition, von Hagens has been the target of some serious accusations. One of the most persistent is that he has used bodies that were unclaimed, found, or even executed—a charge von Hagens vigorously denies. Confusing matters, the success of Body Worlds has spawned several copycat shows with which von Hagens has no connection, including “Bodies, the Exhibition” and “Our Body: The Universe Within.” Von Hagens says his bodies mostly come from a donation program first established in 1982, although a small number arrived from anatomical collections and anatomy programs. And there appears to be no shortage of supply: his Institute for Plastination’s donor roster is up to 8,000 individuals, including 700 Americans. “I am guided by a deep obligation to fulfill the commitment to them by presenting their bodies for the scientific work they chose for themselves after their death,” he says.
Von Hagens doesn’t disclose the identities or causes of death of the bodies. Nor does he sell or otherwise provide them to private collectors or dealers, he says. And for those who are curious, but not curious enough to visit: once the specimens are preserved, they are dry and odorless. Same goes for the gorilla and other preserved animals also on display.
Before the California Science Center hosted its first Body Worlds exhibit in 2004, the institution asked an independent bioethics review panel that included prominent physicians, ethicists, and religious leaders to scrutinize von Hagens’ human body donor process as well as his laboratory in Germany. “[The ethics panel] and we were satisfied, and in fact the body donor forms met and exceeded all legal standards,” says Jeffrey Rudolph, the center’s president and CEO. So comfortable with the process was the lifelong science educator that he has added his name to the donor list. “Why not give my body to continue my life’s work after I’m dead?” he asks.
It is not entirely surprising that for von Hagens to develop such an uncommon passion, he would have an unusual background. Born in 1945, he grew up in Greiz in the former East Germany. A rare bleeding disorder as a child required long periods of hospitalization, sparking an early interest in becoming a physician. “I … became very comfortable in that environment of the sick and dying,” he says.
He entered medical school in 1965 but became preoccupied with protesting communism, prompting him to attempt to defect to the West in 1968. He was caught at the border of what was then then Czechoslovakia and, at 23, was imprisoned for two years. Freedom came after West Germany paid $20,000 for his liberation as a political prisoner, enabling him to complete his medical studies in the West. But after joining the Department of Anesthesiology and Emergency Medicine at Heidelberg University, he was bored by the tedium, leading him to switch to the university’s anatomical institute. It was there, while gazing at bodies embedded in blocks of plastic, that he wondered why the material couldn’t be filled into the cells instead of around them. Plastination was born.
Von Hagens maintains that the principal aim of his exhibition remains education, not just about the inner workings of the human body but also about the effects of various diseases and lifestyle choices. Often, the impact is immediate: cleaning crews, he says, have been finding unopened packs of cigarettes atop cases containing the preserved blackened lungs of smokers. “The body shows many diseases easily, and it is not difficult to highlight,” he says.
That’s just one of the reasons he’s in the process of designing, for the New York University College of Dentistry, the first anatomy curriculum in the United States to use his polymer-infused specimens instead of cadaver dissection. There are advantages, he argues. “Plastination preserves the specimen right to the cellular level, and thus can be studied at a deeper, more penetrating level,” he says. “Systems can be isolated and studied in a more microscopic and tactile way that dissection does not allow.” An example on his website suggests that the gray matter visible in slices of the brain is easier to distinguish from the white medulla oblongata than is the case with a fresh organ.
Has von Hagens contemplated his own inevitable demise? Naturally. He long ago donated his own body to plastination. “My wife feels I should be at the entrance of the exhibit in my trademark hat greeting visitors,” says von Hagens. “My son believes I should be made into sagittal slices and distributed to venues around the world, thus fulfilling my desire to teach at multiple locations at the same time.” But before his family must make such a decision, von Hagens still has plenty of work to do: “There is an elephant currently undergoing plastination, which will take three to four years to complete.” This may be one of the few cases in which visitors will know a little something about the donor. Its name was Samba, and the 7,055-pound pachyderm died at a German zoo.
A companion photo essay is featured here.