Yesterday, my girlfriend and I drove out to Cleveland to see Gunther Von Hagens’ somewhat controversial Body Worlds exhibit. In case you’re not familiar with it, Von Hagens invented a process in the 70’s called plastination, where he replaces bodily fluids with various plastics to preserve them. The exhibit takes a whole bunch of plastinated corpses and poses them in various activities, and you can see inside to muscles and organs and various other body parts. It’s interesting but also creepy. And I guess that’s the whole point of it. According to Von Hagens: “Being controversial is more useful to society than agreement.”

For the most part, the bodies didn’t really seem like bodies at all. They just seemed like plastic display pieces in a museum. And that’s part of what I didn’t like about it. It was almost like it was forcing you to consider humans just as lifeless objects to be studied and gawked at. This attitude was typified by display wordings, which used language like, “This plastinate is posed as a skier” instead of saying, “This person…” When Bodyworlds opened in Germany in 2001 (where its called Korperwelten), Von Hagens was “[…] accused of contributing to the ‘redefinition’ of human dignity associated with Nazi Germany.”

Von Hagens has also been involved in multiple other “socially productive” controversies. He’s been accused of using bodies from executed prisoners of Siberian and Chinese prisons. One article reports:

In March 2001, a German TV current affairs program alleged that one of the bodies had a tattoo showing it came from a Russian prison camp.

Half a year earlier von Hagens had indeed contracted the Anatomical Institute of the University of Novosibirsk to deliver around 150 brains and some 50 bodies to him in Heidelberg. Von Hagens insisted that the bodies displayed in Berlin had already been prepared before the Siberian business deal came about and that the tattoo belonged to a German man who he had personally known. Nevertheless, von Hagens cancelled the contract to avoid further bad publicity.

And a BBC article reports on the Chinese version of the scandal:

German anatomist Gunther von Hagens has said he cannot rule out the possibility that some bodies supplied for his Body Worlds show were executed prisoners.

He was responding in Frankfurt to an article in German magazine Der Spiegel which alleged he had used the bodies of Chinese people sentenced to death.

He said it was “highly improbable” that any such bodies had got through.

However, he said he would return seven Chinese bodies for burial because he could not prove they were not executed.

Von Hagens otherwise goes to great lengths to explain that “all” the bodies given to him are used and displayed with full permission. I think the idea of educating people about the body is an important one. But I don’t know… I mean dead bodies are still dead bodies, no matter how you “slice” it (sorry, I couldn’t resist that pun). And I can handle a lot of stuff, but the dead baby room almost put me over the edge. And there’s definitely a value in controversy and cultural debate, but does that mean you should just do stuff to be controversial and say fuck the consequences, and fuck the issues surrounding it?

Walking around the Science Center yesterday too, I became keenly aware of just how much of science I find really questionable. It’s not just the edu-tainment freakshow usage of human bodies. It extends to many other realms of the myth of progress and scientific advancement at all costs. It’s almost like these museums are weird churches devoted to sanctifying and indoctrinating this myth into people. At the same time, they try to leave ethical and human concerns up to regular religious groups to debate over. And that’s probably the biggest thing I hate about mainstream science: this attitude that they are above having to deal with this stuff. Just make money. Make progress. And if you care about any of the rest, you’re “superstitious” or “backwards.”

This exhibit, of course, has drawn a lot of criticism from religious groups. While there, I was wondering what kind of religious rites, if any, had gone into the whole thing. Besides the funerary rites performed individually on each person, I wondered if at or before the opening of any of these shows, they did any kind of blessing or consecration - or even if they just kind of had a moment of silence and said thanks to these people, and that they wished them no disrespect. I’ve not seen any kind of info about that online. But I did see mention that a Catholic pastor in Berlin held a requiem for the dead when the exhibit opened there. Often I find myself at odds with mainstream religious groups over the things they end up squabbling over - but this is one of those rare cases where I think maybe they’re onto something.

Anyway, I don’t mean to suggest you shouldn’t see this exhibit. It’s definitely eerily fascinating. And as always, I recommend experiencing for yourself, and making up your own mind about it. This is just my two cents.