Given that “Body Worlds” features real, skinned human cadavers and sliced-up body parts, most early visitors seemed to agree that the new exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry is done in good taste.
That’s a pretty good trick for a show that offers up displays like a magnificent horse, dead and skinned, posed dramatically as it rears up, ridden by a weirdly exploded male cadaver holding his own brain in his right hand.
The museum is counting on the exhibit, which runs through Sept. 5, being a blockbuster. It probably will be, as “Body Worlds” has attracted huge, enthusiastic crowds in every city it has been to around the world. So far, 16.5 million people have seen it, and its creator claims 6,500 liked it so much they volunteered to allow their own bodies to be used in future versions.
“Our best advertising is word of mouth,” said the exhibit’s creator, Gunther von Hagens, who brought the exhibit here from the California Science Center in Los Angeles, where 660,000 saw it from July through December.
“When it started in Los Angeles,” he said, “only 1,500 people a day came to see it. By the time it ended, 7,000 people a day were coming.”
Von Hagens, 60, a German anatomist from Heidelberg University, invented a process in 1977 to create durable, remarkably lifelike anatomical specimens by replacing water and fats in biological tissue with injected polymer chemicals, a procedure he calls “plastination.”
At first his aim was simply to devise useful teaching tools for medical and anatomy students, he said. As he perfected his ability to preserve whole cadavers, he said he began thinking the preserved remains had a sort of beauty and power that could educate ordinary people about the body and health issues.
Von Hagens calls “Body Worlds” the “democratization of anatomy.”
“We don’t see death anymore,” he said. “Death is hidden in hospitals by the medical business.
“People get an aesthetic shock when they come to this exhibit,” he said, when they see how intricate and beautiful the inside of the body is.
His idea was to pose the cadavers in active physical activities such as running, dancing, swimming and bicycling, or playing games like chess. Each cadaver is prepared in such a way that it highlights a body system or group of systems at work–respiratory, circulatory, musculature, nervous, digestive, reproductive and so on.
“A lot of people think it will be a lot of goriness,” von Hagens said, “but they are surprised when they come here. Many, many young people tell me when they go home, they think about what they have seen and become proud of their bodies and want to take care of their health.”
When he first proposed doing public exhibits in Germany of the plastinated cadavers, von Hagens said his colleagues thought he should seek professional help for his delusion.
“Scandalous,” was the word he heard most often for his idea, he said. “I was told it simply was not fitting for the public to see such things.”
But a visiting Japanese researcher working at Heidelberg thought the exhibit was a brilliant and honorable idea and invited von Hagens to try it out in Japan. The first exhibit ran in Tokyo for two months, attracting nearly half a million people. From there it went to other Japanese and Asian cities, then to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and England.
In nearly every venue, it has been touched by controversy to some degree, attacked by some religious figures and laypeople for sensationalizing, profiteering from or showing disrespect to the dead. The criticism usually begins to fade when people see what actually is in the exhibit, von Hagens said.
All of the cadavers, he said, are of people who knew they would be put on public display and signed consent agreements before they died, eager that their remains be put to good use in educating the public in health issues.
Many of the cadavers in fact display the diseased organs that killed the people who once inhabited the bodies. There are many deeply blackened lungs of smokers, some with cancerous growth, for example.
“I want to go home and bring back every relative and friend of mine I have who is a smoker,” said Linda Cox, 58, a retired clothing manufacturer from Oklahoma City. She and her daughter, Whitney, 21, flew into Midway Airport Friday morning on their way to Milwaukee, saw a brochure at the airport for the exhibit and decided to see it.
“My dad was a doctor,” Cox said, “and seeing all this makes me think what a wonderful teaching tool this would be.”
The idea that the cadavers and the 200 additional body parts on display are real might seem creepy. But it seems to lend power and poignancy to the exhibit.
As the exhibit has traveled through other cities, writers have described it as intersecting across lines of art, anatomy and religion. At the Chicago opening, the atmosphere among visitors was hushed, intensely interested and respectful.
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“I know they were once actual, living people, but you don’t dwell on that,” said Bill Kenney, 43, a Chicago hotel worker who was with his girlfriend, Tamra Lind, 38, a Northlake postal worker, at the Friday opening.
He said he was a little bothered by seeing fully intact, preserved fetuses and the body of a woman eight months’ pregnant, with her child in her womb. Overall, however, he found the exhibit spellbinding, including the evidence of modern surgical procedures in the cadavers, such as heart valves and artificial hip joints.
“I don’t think it’s gory at all,” Lind said. “Maybe that is helped by the poses the cadavers are in. They’re all doing stuff that we all do every day, so they don’t seem repulsive.”
“Body Worlds” has been so successful that von Hagens already has launched a second touring exhibit, “Body Worlds II,” and has a third one under development. He has four plastination centers operating in four countries, turning out cadavers and body slices for public exhibition and for medical schools and universities.
Finding bodies is no problem, he said. Of the 6,500 people who have willed their bodies to him, one dies about every 10 days, enough to keep up with demand, and more people sign up to donate their bodies at every museum venue he visits.
“I’m interested in doing that,” Linda Cox said. “It means my death would incur no cost to my family. Everybody would just say goodbye.
“I have a problem with cemeteries, because they take up so much beautiful natural space. This way, my remains would be of educational value in an exhibit. The idea that millions of people would see my cadaver doesn’t bother me. I kind of like the thought of that.”
Combined admission to the museum and “Body Worlds” is $21 for adults, $11 for children ages 3 to 11, and $17 for seniors.