The Human Body is a Messy Thing

I recently had the opportunity to visit the Bodyworlds exhibit in Denver at the Museum of Science and Nature. For those who don't know, a German has created a process called plastination, in which he basically injects recently dead bodies with some kind of material that allows for almost pristine preservation of muscles, organs, fluids, veins, nerves, etc. He has used this process to create a series of exhibits that allow the general public to see organs, nerve networks, and full cadavers in various positions and postures, allowing unprecedented insight into how the human body looks and works in its numerous facets. And from that show, I definitely left with a better understanding of how complicated, complex, and simply messy the human body is.

Suffice to say, this exhibition kept me thinking on numerous issues. First, I found it more slightly more disturbing than I thought I would. Throughout the show, I had a perpetual dull sense of pain in my stomach, a pain driven from the abstract "grossness" of it all, and sometimes increasing with certain images (such as the cross-section of a woman's body in the abdomen area, complete with an illustration of her in her constipated state at the time of her death). However, from talking to others, the queasiness varies from one person to another - I had no problem with a skeleton and the nerve system of a late-human mapped out, so you could see where all the nerves went, yet my girlfriend found it one of the grossest parts.

One nice thing about the show is it forces us to break taboos about death. When you see all these bodies and body parts and know (sometimes, though rarely) what might have caused these deaths, you deal with death. It's also not uncommon to find yourself pondering what you would like done with your body. The show was a smash success financially - it was sold out everyday I was there, with shows every fifteen minutes from 8 AM to 10:30 PM. THis inherently means that thousands upon thousands of people are witnessing this exhibition and probably confronting death and dealing with it in their own way. Thus, in one regard, the show perhaps provides us with an important benefit by shattering the social taboo and silence we have on death and the body.

I can't speak to the ethics of the show. I did joke that "only the Germans" would come up with such an exhibit. However, in ethical terms, there's really no way to judge, for you know nothing about the bodies, who they were, how they died, if this is what they wanted, etc. The point was to put them up there without such info so you could see the inner workings of the body. Thus, I have no way of knowing whether they (the ex-people) had desired to have their bodies donated to science, or even if this particular show was the "science" they were dedicating their bodies to.

Being only about 70 miles from Colorado Springs (AKA James Dobson's world headquarters), I also found myself wondering about the religious and/or socio-political ideological response to this show. Overall, it seemed peaceful enough, and there wasn't much in the media saying how horribly it had been received by certain political sectors (though the show began in March, so the storm may have died down). Particularly intersting to me was the ramifications of the birth section. They had a woman who died at five months of pregnancy, and had her standing and cut open so that you could see the fetus inside her. Also, you could see what a human embryo looked like every two weeks from 4 weeks old to 16 weeks old, and then they had fetuses the rest of the time. Most of us have seen a fetus on TV, medical journals, etc., but the embryos were particularly amazing to me, both for the fact that such a fuss has erupted in Washington D.C. over something so small, and that scientists have learned how to use such tiny things to perhaps help with such ailments as paralysis, alzheimers, and numerous others.

I'm still unsure to what extent the purpos of the show was education vs. exhibition vs. exploitation. There were certainly some amazingly educational parts - I found the comparison of different organs to be particularly remarkable. You had the opportunity to see regular lungs vs. smoker's lungs vs. coal miner's lungs. You could see a regular kidney compared to diseased kidneys (including poly-cystic kidney disease - a condition that a family member of mine had, and thus was particularly remarkable). You could see a regular liver vs. a fatty liver vs. a liver with cirrhosis. You could even see what a cross section of a fat person's body looked like (amazing, and if most Americans could see that, you might hope that they would eat better).

However, I found the exhibit particularly exhibitionist and perhaps even exploitative with the posing of full bodies. For example, they had male bodies posed swinging a baseball bat or doing a ski jump or a skateboard move to "show" how the body works. However, the emphasis was on the muscles, and one can't help but suggest that frozen images of muscles in a particular activity aren't very useful - the whole way to understand muscles is through motion, not stasis. Additionally, there was an odd gender component to these full-cadavers in various poses. Almost all of them were men. The only ones with women were in a figure skating pose (with a male cadaver, though to be fair, the placard describing what you were seeing placed the woman ice skater in the more active, skilled, difficult role, pointing out all she had to do for such a pose, while the male figure "passively" balanced her), as well as a woman in a yoga pose and the aforementioned woman-with-fetus. The rest were men. I don't know if this was simply b/c the show had more men to work with than women or what, but it certainly leads one to consider the show and the poses in terms of social constructs.

Finally, the "exploitation" component comes through in the cadavers, because they are all doing remarkable activities - not everyday activities like eating, sleeping, etc. One has know way of knowing if the skier actually skied, if the baseball cadaver actually played baseball, etc. Thus, you can't help but wonder if the full-bodies were actually to a degree there for shock value as much as anything. Certainly, the use of some bodies in non-activity-based poses was amazing, such as the body that was cut into numerous vertical cross sections for you to see just about everything inside. But the poses (which dominate on the website) leave one, not necessarily unsettled, but just uncertain of what it is one has just seen.

If Bodyworlds comes to a town near you, it's worth considering whether you would go or not, and if you do, it's definitely worth it for what you can learn. More valuable for such exhibitions, however, is how we consider their purpose, their constructs, what they say about society, etc. After all, who knows if, in 20, 30, 50 years, we'll look back at this show as brilliant, as remarkably ignorant or flawed, or if we'll just forget it. And that's one of the strongest benefits of such a show - it gets us thinking about issues that we can't necessarily answer.