Body Worlds

I went to see Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds 3 exhibition with some of my yoga buddies yesterday. For those who don’t know, Body Worlds is an scientific exhibition of real dead bodies that have been plasticized where the water and fat in tissues in the body are replaced with a reaction plastic such as silicon rubber, epoxy resin or polyester. We had talked about this exhibition earlier on in the teacher training because it’s one of the rare opportunities to actually see real live anatomy – how nerves and bones and muscles actually connect.

I remember when the exhibition was in London few years back, and the controversy surrounding it. I can understand that some people have issues with displaying real dead bodies – hell, few years back I wouldn’t have wanted to have anything to do with this. All von Hagens has done though is what has been done for centuries for entertainment (public autopsies used to be considered educational entertainment) – we’ve always had a fascination towards the human body. The exhibition has been immensely popular around the world - over 17 million people have seen it so far. All bodies in the exhibition have been donated by people who have given their permission to be used on public display – so in principle I don’t see anything wrong with that. If that isn’t something you want to see, just don’t go to see it, it’s that simple.

Like I said – I wanted to see it because of my newfound interest in anatomy. But my guess would be that most people want to see it as a freak show, and there were certainly lot of people there – we queued for an hour before we were let in, and spent another couple of hours going through it because it was so crowded.

And it certainly left an impact.

First of all, it was extremely interesting. There were three kinds of displays: individual bones, joints and organs, whole bodies in strange poses and plasticized slices. For the individual “items” there were often a healthy one and a damaged one side by side – like healthy lungs and smokers lungs, healthy knee joint and one with arthritis and so on. Same with the slices, normal bones and bones with osteoporosis, for example. I think it’s the whole bodies though that are the biggest cause of the controversies. First thought is that the poses are certainly strange – often athletic like jumping or throwing a javelin, but also just pure strange like praying. Moving on in the exhibition there’s a man who’s just walking, and you realize that to properly see different muscles working in different ways it’s actually quite useful to see them in variety of poses.

And I was surprisingly fine with bones and muscles and organs – it’s strange, for sure, but not that disturbing. But external tissues like skin – that I found disconcerting (I could go on describing what human skin looks like – there was this one body who (that?) was holding his (its?) whole skin in his outstretched arm – but the more sensitive amongst you wouldn’t appreciate it, believe me). I think Nicole got a bit freaked out and had to leave after first 10 minutes or so, and don't really think she was the only one - I myself felt a bit iffy on several occasions... but breathing helps.

Totally worth the experience, for sure. It has left me feeling strange though, maybe I need to think about it and elaborate later on.

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