Body Worlds

Whew. I have had a week to recover from my Saturday morning at the BodyWorlds exhibit at ScienceWorld, so I feel ready to talk about it.

I cant say I was dying to go in the first place, I just kind of found myself drawn there. In fact I was sort of frightened that it would be really grotesque. I was surprised that when I entered the exhibit, my immediate experience was relief; the bodies didn't seem real at all, they seemed like they were made of resin or plastic or some synthetic substance. My mind had a hard time reconciling the information it was receiving: what I was looking at had, at one time, been living, breathing humans each one with a set of stories, a network of other people who loved them and each one with their own voice.

The next thing to come over me was a certain annoyance with Dr. Günter von Hagens, the creator of plastination (the process they treat the bodies with for the exhibit). Most of the bodies were contorted into positions that would be impossible in real life. And when I say that I don't mean their legs were splayed weirdly, I mean they were holding their own hearts in their hands, or in one case holding their entire set of internal organs above their heads. Necessary? I guess so if what you want to do is create a stir to publicize your artwork. Not so much if what you want to do is teach me what the human body gets up to inside.

That said, there were elements of the exhibit that I found interesting, for example I never knew my lungs were as high as they are. It was very cool to see how fat collects around our internal organs. And as a woman of childbearing age, I was amazed to the point of tears at the fetuses from week one onwards.

As I neared the 3/4 point through the tour, I realized that I was feeling really thirsty and a bit nauseated. Even though the bodies didn't seem real, I think I must have been picking up on the real-ness of it all on some level.

I wonder if the people who donated their bodies had any idea that Dr. von Hagens was planning on depicting the human form in such an obviously impossible way?