Der Tod und das Mädchen.
A little more on bodies, and hucksters, and being taken for a ride: when you wear a black fedora at every opportunity; when you absolutely forbid photography so you can sell more art books and fridge magnets and mouse pads; when you gussy up a host of various biotechnological processes (some pretty, some not, some elegant, some brutish) with a puffily vague neologism like “plastination”; when you protest a bit too much in your brochures about the scientificity of your purpose, its grandeur, its magnificence; when you trumpet your records broken with eyebrow-kicking statistics; when you dedicate your exhibit to its donors with a large multilingual stone plaque—any one of these may not in and of themselves say huckster or mountebank or aggrandizing four-flusher, but put all of them together, and your nose starts to itch. At least, mine did. And again, this is not a crime: I’m not averse to a wee bit of razzle-dazzle to get ’em in the door. Science, especially biology, badly needs some showmanship these days, and if some niceties are glossed to buff up that dazzle, well, we’re only human. We like us a good story (something the Democrats also need to learn), and we can save the rough edges for the footnotes, and if somebody walks out with a wrong idea, well, there’s no guarantee that arrant pedantry would have prevented it.
But there’s æsthetics, and then there’s ethics.
DALIAN, China (AP)—Hidden in a maze of factories in the heart of this northeastern Chinese port city is the house Gunther von Hagens built—and, for many, a place where nightmares are created.
Inside von Hagens’ sprawling, well-guarded compound, behind a leaning metal fence pocked with holes, are more than 800 human beings—200 of his staffers and 645 dead bodies in steel cases from almost a dozen nations.
The anatomist, whose exhibits of preserved human corpses have riled religious leaders in Europe and attracted the curious and the outraged across the world, set up shop here three years ago to process bodies for his shows.
Last month, media reports from von Hagens’ native Germany asserted that at least two of the corpses, both Chinese, had bullet holes in their skulls—the method China uses for execution. It’s a charge that von Hagens rejects vehemently, saying all his specimens were donated by people who signed releases.
“I absolutely prohibit and do not accept death penalty bodies,” von Hagens, a tall, thin man in a fedora, said this week during a rare tour of his Dalian facility.
But, he added, “Many things can happen. . . . I cannot exclude that (possibility).”
Von Hagens launched his Body Worlds exhibits in 1997 and has shown them to nearly 14 million people from Japan and Korea to Britain and Germany. Shows are running now in Frankfurt, Germany and Singapore.
The displays feature healthy and diseased body parts as well as skinned, whole corpses in assorted poses—a rider atop a horse, a pregnant woman reclining—that show off the preservation technique von Hagens developed in 1977.
Dubbed “plastination,” the process replaces bodily fluids and fat with epoxy and silicone, making the bodies durable for exhibition and study.
Thanks to John & Belle for the tip. —Nothing appears to have come of any charges —“German prosecutors said that as the institutions were legal custodians of the bodies if relatives of the dead did not claim them, Hagens was allowed to buy them,” says this article, which doesn’t do anything to make any of the above come any closer to proper. Nor is this the first time that Körperwelten has raised these sorts of questions. And I’m not exactly thrilled at the idea of a Chinese knock-off—even if the knock-off rather primly disavows the very profit motive that one might maintain has driven von Hagens into graymarket grave-robbing. (There’s other appetites than money-lust, after all.)
If I were snarkout, I might use this as a launchpad for a deftly curated smörgåsbord of links on autopsies and body-imagery and death fixations and the humorously contingent history of corpse-squeam. But I’m not. And I’m at work. And in a mood. von Hagens has done a Bad Thing, but not, apparently, an Illegal Thing (though Germany, perhaps pettishly, is fining von Hagens for “abuse of an academic title”). The people who didn’t explicitly sign on with this project should never have been used—that multilingual dedicatory plaque now thumps like a tell-tale heart—and yet, the harm’s been done: what good would it do to take them down in an essentially symbolic gesture? Æsthetics, to assuage our ethics? (Presuming, of course, that we could even find them.) —The show is loopy as art, and no great shakes as science—but there’s literally nothing else like it (well—except the Chinese knock-off). And there ought to be. Is that enough? (Enough for what?)
Maybe I’ll just end by linking to the lyrics of “The Cowboy Outlaw.”
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I'm at work too, so for the nonce I'll just recommend you visit the Mütter Museum next time you're in the Northeast.
Hmm. You know that OMSI (to cite on example) has bodies, or at least body parts preserved in a similar fashion?
This is the most egregious example of technological experimentation on moribund loved ones since Lucas pumped digital special effects embalming fluid into the totemic, mummified husks of the original Star Wars films in order to tart 'em up for an extended open casket viewing in multiplexes across the hinterlands.
I'm glad I didn't know about the Chinese body bank before seeing this exhibit. Searching for bullet holes would have detracted from the overall experience.