Bodyworlds 2

Science, Or a “Cadaver Circus”?

By Richard Martin, 6-28-06

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The "Bodyworlds 2" exhibit at the Denver Museum of Science and Natural History, which closes July 23, has been packing in crowds for weeks, necessitating the addition of extra evening hours. A show of mummified dead bodies might be expected to have a macabre appeal, but the museum, like the other institutes around the world that have displayed the work of German anatomist Gunther von Hagens -- who invented the "plastination" process that preserves body parts and allows the corpses to be displayed in standing, running, or leaping poses -- touts the exhibit as hard science, contributing to our understanding of the wonders of human anatomy.

My reaction: the show's great, if you like looking at cadavers.

The bodies – all of them real living human beings, once – are displayed like sculpture, with titles and von Hagen's signature. Flayed and dissected, they're posed in various vigorous activities – playing soccer, figure skating, doing yoga. The idea conveyed in the accompanying literature for the exhibit is that von Hagens is a pioneer whose work with corpses and his traveling displays have advanced the science of anatomy.

Not everyone agrees. Von Hagens' work, and his flamboyant promotion thereof, have caused controversy in Europe and the U.K., with critics calling it a "Cadaver Circus" and his shows sparking outrage even while drawing huge crowds. Wearing his trademark black fedora, von Hagens conducted an autopsy on live TV in England a few years back, a stunt that failed to promote the advance of modern science in any noticeable way. Von Hagens has made millions from his exhibitions, but he's basically been disavowed by the mainstream medical research community. He has also been fined by German authorities for using the title "Professor," an honorific he claims from the Dalian Medical University in China.

Though von Hagens says all the cadavers he uses are from donors, he's also been accused of using the bodies of executed political prisoners from China, and a German newsmagazine in 1999 claimed to have traced 56 of von Hagen's subjects and found them to be smuggled corpses of Siberian peasants and mental patients from Russia.

All that aside, I found the display to be oddly unaffecting. The flayed athletes and thinkers gazed vacantly into space from their naked skulls, their nervous system -- surely one of the most wondrous achievements of the Creation -- running like soiled threads to their pinkish, striated muscles. They looked like inert lumps of plasticized flesh, which of course is exactly what they are, and they have all the vapidity of death. Ultimately, in the light of day, the macabre holds our interest only briefly (re-read Dracula and note how little actual blood-sucking actually occurs). While we're still breathing, we have other concerns, and artists and scientists have for centuries worked to raise these lumps of flesh, this "quintessence of dust," as the line from Hamlet included in the exhibit puts it, beyond the merely physical. Von Hagens' work is neither art nor science; it's spectacle, like a public beheading -- or autopsy.

My 6-year-old son, who has a great appreciation for the ghoulish and the gross, was thoroughly bored after 10 minutes. With keen insight if not strict accuracy, he commented, "If I want to look at body parts I can see them at the doctor's office."

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