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Cadavers Steal the Show in L.A. |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Tuesday, 07 September 2004 |
Sep. 07, 2004 PT
LOS ANGELES -- With a basketball in hand, arm stretched forward and one foot off the ground, the man on display at a Los Angeles science museum looks like he's dribbling toward a two-pointer. But a half-second glance reveals that he's missing a few things. Like a pair of shoes. A uniform. And, incredibly, just about every last bit of his skin.
The unidentified basketball player is a dissected and flayed cadaver, preserved in a way that makes him look like a freeze-dried statue. While his skin is gone, a variety of muscle fibers, blood vessels and glands remains. Even his testicles and trimmed toenails are intact. And in one last touch, his skull is cracked open to reveal his reddish-brown brain.
Creepy? Maybe. A crowd-pleaser? Absolutely. The basketball player and some 20 other preserved bodies have been traveling Europe and Asia for eight years, attracting an estimated 15 million visitors. Now, the controversial Body Worlds exhibit is on display in the United States for the first time.
Each day, steady streams of visitors pay $12 each and spend hours peering into the eyes -- some fake, some real -- of the dead at the California Science Center, a museum that sits next to the University of Southern California. Typical visits last two hours or more.
"A lot of people come in with an initial apprehension, but they get consumed with the fascination for what they look like under the skin," said deputy museum director Diane Perlov. "That mesmerizes them and takes over."
Indeed, the crowd was hushed on a recent Sunday afternoon as they gaped at a man playing chess, with all his nerves exposed, and at the "swimmer," a blond woman posed as if gliding through water, oblivious to the fact that she's in two pieces, split laterally down the spine to expose a cross section of her body.
Behind glass stands a preserved family of three, showing off their blood vessels -- and only their blood vessels. All their bones and other organs have been removed, making them look like bizarre stuffed animals. And nearby, a man stands with his right hand held high, holding on to his entire skin, the feet and hands hanging limply, in a pose reminiscent of the Sistine Chapel image of the martyred St. Bartholomew, who is said to have been flayed alive.
Elsewhere among the dozens of exhibits in the show, visitors can pick up a preserved liver, examine the sickly blackened lungs of smokers or see what an IUD looks like in a uterus.
The credit, or the blame, for the show belongs to a German doctor named Gunther von Hagens who's no stranger to public attention. A Poland native and political protester who spent two years in an East German prison, von Hagens developed a procedure called plastination in the 1970s to preserve bodies and body parts. In a process similar to embalming, workers preserve bodies by replacing fluids with polymers that allow various degrees of rigidity or flexibility.
"The body is frozen in time between death and decay," von Hagens said.
Initially, anatomists used plastination to preserve body parts for anatomy classes at medical schools, which are moving away from traditional dissection. But von Hagens had bigger, more public, aspirations for the technique. He wanted to expose our insides to the outside.
"Laypeople have the same right as a physician to see the inside of a body," said the 59-year-old doctor, a thin-faced man who adds to his undertaker image by always wearing a black hat. "The body is something you can be proud of. It's a treasure, not something gory."
In Los Angeles, many of the exhibit's biggest fans are doctors who are getting a better view of the body than they've ever had, even in anatomy classes and operating rooms.
"Never before had I been able to see all the veins, all the capillaries of the body," said Dr. Clayton Patchett, a Pasadena, California, orthopedic surgeon who visited the Body Worlds show. "I came away with a greater respect for our bodies and -- even though I'm a doctor and I'm supposed to know this stuff -- just how marvelous the body really is."
Not every medical professional is so enthusiastic about von Hagens' exhibit, now in its third month in the United States.
"Probably every anatomist is conflicted or ambivalent to a certain extent," said Dr. Lawrence M. Ross, adjunct professor at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and secretary of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists.
"There are anatomists who put on their educational hats and say if it helps a broad spectrum of the population to understand about their body, who's to criticize that? That's the good part of it. At the same time, an anatomist may feel that it's somewhat sensationalized in the context of putting these specimens in these sensational positions. Is it in good taste? I don't know."
Others aren't as diplomatic as Ross, who hasn't seen the show. When the Body Worlds show traveled through Europe, critics angrily condemned it as a morbid "puppet show." In Germany, officials reportedly forced von Hagens to give the cadavers more dignity by removing the basketball dribbled by the basketball player and the soccer ball blocked by the goalkeeper. (Both balls returned when the show landed in America.)
It doesn't help matters that von Hagens is a showman who clearly relishes attracting media attention by launching stunts and annoying the establishment. In 2002, he nearly ran afoul of British law by performing an autopsy in front of a live audience and TV viewers. Besides promoting his traveling cadaver show, he makes enemies by blasting the medical community, accusing educators of hiding the secrets of the body by cloaking them in impenetrable medical terminology.
"It's a kind of dark spot in history, how anatomy has been taken away from the people without protest," he said.
Then there's the issue of the bodies themselves. Von Hagens, who denies any wrongdoing, has been dogged by reports that he illegally obtained some of the bodies from Russia. But according to von Hagens, everyone on exhibit -- even the woman who died while eight months pregnant and still has a fetus in her exposed belly -- agreed to donate their bodies to medical research.
In fact, von Hagens is continuing to add to his list of more than 6,000 men, women and children -- nearly all Germans -- who want to be preserved after death. Von Hagens himself wishes to be plastinated, as do his wife, his adult children and half of his main support staff of 40 people.
Until he is preserved in plastic for eternity, however, von Hagens has other things to worry about. As the Body Worlds show travels to as-yet-unannounced American venues after leaving Los Angeles next January, he hopes to better perfect the art of plastination, which doesn't do a good job of preserving fat in the body. (Brains are a challenge to preserve, too, because there's not much water to replace with polymers, he said.)
Von Hagens also wants to think of new poses for his cadavers, such as a pair of ice skaters, and preserve more animals, perhaps even an elephant, to complement the show's most popular exhibit, a preserved man riding a preserved horse. A plastinated gorilla is already making its way to the United States from China, home to von Hagens' 200-employee plastination company. "I have," he said, "a historic mission to fulfill."
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64827,00.html?tw=wn_1culthead |
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