MikePadgett.com

Body Worlds in Brussels

— People donate their bodies to Gunther von Hagens. He exhibits his work. Other people get upset. I wanted to find out why.”

The art of the Ancient Greeks and of the Renaissance shares a common concern for anatomical accuracy. It comes as no surprise, then, that these were also periods in which anatomy itself was the subject of much study.

Anatomy by dissection

The dissection of human cadavers for academic examination was recorded in Alexandria in pre-Christian times. The works of Galen, originally written in second century Greece and extended by pre-medieval Islamic scholars, are the definitive examples of a considerable oeuvre.

Both Leonardo and Michelangelo are widely known to have participated in, or even led, such dissections and the results of these examinations are plainly visible in their artistic output.

Perceptions of death

As Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibition tells visitors, death was not always a taboo. In centuries past, when the importance of sanitary conditions was not understood and the basic ingredients of medicine were  herbal or mere superstition, death was a part of daily life. Plagues, wars and endemic disease meant that people maintained a comfortable familiarity with their own mortality.

If modern science generated a kind of empirical predictability about the human body and its environment, it also removed death to a space outside of our immediate vicinity, such that its impact on our lives today tends to be shocking and personal. Ironically however, death remains just as unfathomable now as it did to our ancestors.

Science goes public

Modern science, with all its complexities, has also been the exclusive province of a trained, professional and academic élite. We are expected to trust our doctors and surgeons in a way that our predecessors would never have done with travelling mountebanks and barbaric local physicians.

Yet ours is an unusual period, in which monopolies of craft, expertise and information are starting to explode into commodities with as yet uncertain results. Just as the Internet provides us with a wealth of data (of varying accuracy) or we can buy our furniture of the shelf and put it together (if we’re given the right screws and bolts), so too can we begin to learn more about ourselves. In a world where the forces of supply and demand were never more obvious, the thirst for information engenders more information.

There is nevertheless a considerable leap from Gunther von Hagens’ development of his plastination technique to his thoroughly modern decision to open a public display of human bodies preserved in plastic.

Plastination

Von Hagens patented plastination in 1977. The embalmed body is first dissected then bathed in an acetone solution. As the body is cooled, the acetone replaces the water, and boiled in a further bath of plastic solution, the acetone evaporates to be in turn replaced by the plastic. Finally, the plastic solution is hardened, after which the “plastin” can be posed.

The plastin and the visitor

The original purposes of von Hagens’ plastins were academic, their accuracy being invaluable in the modern study of anatomy.

However, von Hagens decided to take his specimens to the wider public with the Body Worlds exhibition, reasoning that we had only to overcome our modern taboo of death and then we might learn something.

Following a preface that consists of elements of philosophy, art and science, I found myself eventually standing in front of a plastin for the first time.

Actually I felt relatively unmoved by the fact that this complex sculpture of pink, taut fibres and white cartilage had once been a functioning human being. After all, von Hagens (rightly) maintains strict anonymity with regard to the former owners of his exhibits.

As time progressed however, the issue of identity began to press upon me. The effects of smoking, drinking and various other diseases were engaging and in no small part instructive, but perhaps because I am rather more right-brained, my mind wandered off into the realms of the subjective in a way that had often also happened when I used to study common law cases.

The identity of a missing person

Who were these plastins? It was a forbidden question, of course, and not at all part of von Hagens’ intentions. Each plastin had been posed in such a fashion as to display the relationships between muscles, organs and limbs, but each frozen state resembled a life situation and in me, encouraged reflection about the living being.

The exhibition explained that contemporaries of the Renaissance considered the human body a fragile, vulnerable receptacle of the soul. The soul was the real identity of the person, rather than the body. In the same way, we would be assured that a plastin is not a person, for the person has left us.

Such thinking inspires the obvious question, where did that person go? And of course, those religions that have decried Body Worlds for, among other complaints, a lack of respect for death and the dead, have their own, often facile answers to that question.

Make the most of now

Accordingly, along with the exposition of some of the complexities of the human body, Body Worlds succeeds in at least one other of its aims, which is to demystify death by reminding us of its proximity.

I arrived at that point from general sentiments of sadness. All of the plastins had indeed once been people. They had laughed and cried, they had felt pain and they had probably suffered, some almost certainly terminally. Death had come to them all eventually, sometimes prematurely, just as it will for each of us who still occupy our bodies.

Ascending from the Cureghem Cellars – where the Body Worlds exhibition is currently being held – the cold air was clear and bracing. Back in the pale autumn sunlight at Delacroix station, with J beside me, we awaited the métro back home. I resolved then in some small way that we had better make the most of now, while we’re still here. As von Hagens successfully showed us, the human body is a marvellous thing – skin on or skin off – and we can achieve remarkable things with it. Since death is never far away and we can’t know for sure where we’ll go next, we need to be grateful for what we have now.