Controversial Exhibit Reveals What Lies Beneath

Leave your body to science, or endow the arts? With professor Gunther von Hagens, you could do both.

Von Hagens has shocked and intrigued people throughout Europe with his Body Worlds exhibition, a controversial display of human corpses, preserved, stripped, dissected and explained in biological detail.

Body Worlds has been greeted variously as a unique art exhibit, a brilliant lesson in anatomy and a ghoulish invitation to voyeurism.

The fleshless corpses are positioned in poses--swimming, running, riding, cycling. Controversial exhibits include a reclining pregnant woman and several fetuses, some normal, some deformed.

“The human body has always been chastised,” Von Hagens said. “For instance, Hollywood has influenced us by connecting anatomy with decay, dying, crime and horror. Here I want to get away from the cruelty, to give people an aesthetic shock.”

The show has attracted more than 9 million visitors to its various venues over the last five years, including more than a quarter of a million in the first four months of its run at a converted East London brewery. Inspired by the show, a score of Britons have recently pledged their bodies for future exhibits. The professor and his team are making plans to move the exhibits to the United States this year.

It all began 25 years ago at Heidelberg University in Germany. Von Hagens, then an assistant anatomy professor, felt frustrated by studying anatomy with badly preserved specimens.

“I found a new way to preserve human tissue which actually makes it dry, odorless and retains color,” the professor said of his specimens. He has patented his method, which he calls “plastination.”

Plastination goes beyond the simple embalming process with formaldehyde. In a several-step process, bodily fluids are removed and ultimately replaced with a silicon-type substance, or polymer, which keeps the specimen pliable. Thus, the body becomes a life-size, multidimensional, visible, touchable specimen.

Controversy and debate have accompanied the exhibit since it opened here in April. A number of lawmakers tried to ban the exhibition, and protesters have attacked some of the specimens. One visitor, Martin Wyness, threw a cover over the reclining pregnant woman and poured paint around the body to keep people away.

Ruth Webster, a founder of a support group established in the wake of an organ-harvesting scandal at a Liverpool hospital, said she had been prepared to demonstrate against the exhibition. “But now I’ve seen it and seen how educational it is,” she said. “Anybody who’s interested in anatomy should see it. I even took my 10-year-old daughter.”

But Peter McCaig, editor of the ecological publication Green Events, was outraged on hearing of Body Worlds. His editorial in July declared that he had no intention of seeing the show, which he considers “the ultimate objectification and brutalization of the human form. It seems but one step removed from cannibalism.”

In early August, Von Hagens invited British donors to come forward, as they have in other countries where he has exhibited--Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium--and offer their bodies as future “plastinates.” More than 20 people answered the call, ages 17 to 70.

“I will die very happy knowing my body will generate an educational interest,” said future donor Raymond Edwards, 51.

“I have no shortage of bodies,” Von Hagens said one evening as people wandered around the exhibition. “But I thought it best to present the British donors to the public so that they believe it’s not necessary for me to go and dig them up.

“Ninety percent of the specimens I work with are bodies of those who have consented to give them; the others are from collections already used for research.”

Last year, Von Hagens was involved in a controversy over whether he was illegally sent body parts from a medical school in Siberia. He denied it, saying he had signed a contract with the university to plastinate and return bodies to the school for research.

Visitors to the exhibition--who pay $15 admission--show no signs of horror or disgust, instead spending minutes listening to audio explanations, or gazing at dissected organs, often prodding themselves as they follow a digestive tract or work out where their liver is.

Although the corpses are posed, Von Hagens stressed that he isn’t motivated by any artistic impulse.

“I am a physician, an anatomist. But I am really by no means an artist, because I never tried to create anything with the aim of making it into a special form or shape,” he said.

The idea is, and always was, he said, to show the human body “in its holistic aspects, total--I call it event anatomy. Therefore I close the gap between the dead and the living by putting the plastinated body into a position which is lifelike.”

In early exhibitions, he left the bodies in the traditional upright, anatomical pose, but the public found the Frankenstein stances dehumanizing, doll-like and frightening, he said.

So he studied the few existing examples of 16th century preserved corpses and the anatomical drawings of Renaissance scholars such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius, some of which are reproduced as background for the exhibition.

Every exhibit shows a different aspect of human machinery--the brain, the digestive system, the backbone can be studied as single pieces or in conjunction with the rest of the body.

A figure on horseback holds out a human brain, twice the size of the brain of the massive, muscular horse he is riding.

“Beneath the skin, we are very similar to the horse,” Von Hagens said, adding that he is keen to continue his anatomy work comparing the human to other animals. “I am already working on a gorilla, a camel, and recently even worked on a whale.”

The only trouble with his approach, Von Hagens said, is that he is now “dubbed as an artist.” An understandable misconception, perhaps--he habitually dresses in black and wears a black broad-brimmed hat.

His “exploded” versions of the human body, as he calls his dissections, make for exciting, unusual forms and shapes. “Some critics then say, ‘He has transformed the human body into a totem pole--he is an artist!’ ” Von Hagens said. “But I do it so I can have a full view of the body inside and out, without taking anything away.”

There is nothing artistic in the audio and visual explanations of the exhibition. Basic facts and statistics are given: The human skeleton only weighs about 25 pounds, a body’s veins and arteries laid end to end are 56,000 miles long, and the largest and heaviest organ of the human body is the skin.

But in the world of science, Von Hagens said, he has critics who view his lifelike body poses with suspicion, while many in the art world applaud them.

“I would certainly bring my students here,” Zoltan Mihalik, a 27-year-old Hungarian medical teacher and anesthetist from Budapest University Clinic, said after viewing the show. But he said the lifelike poses aren’t appropriate. “I can’t help feeling that someone’s feelings could be hurt. To show figures playing chess or riding a bicycle is not necessary.”

But some in the medical field are fans of the exhibit.

Colin Stolkin, a senior lecturer in anatomy at King’s College London, has been following Von Hagens’ progress for some years. “It’s a fantastic exhibition,” he said. “It’s a great advance in the way anatomy can be presented. The sectioning of the body parts is unique--it’s like the physical view of what CAT scanning shows.”

Stolkin has taken both medical students and art students to the exhibition, “even people who are quite squeamish, and they all found it fascinating ... not sensationalist nor gory.”

Von Hagens says his plastination method is an accepted form of anatomical research that he has sold to 40 countries and 400 universities throughout the world. According to Body Worlds’ press materials, proceeds from the current exhibition go toward financing plastination research.

“My shows are always seen first by the medical students, who take notes and come back. Then come the intellectuals and the artists, and now,” he said, looking at Britons from all walks of life wandering round the exhibition, “come the ordinary people, men and women, even with their children.

“After all, everyone has a body, and this is a walk through the body.”

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Stobart is a researcher in The Times’ London bureau.