As I was shepherded into a dimly-lit lift, I was expecting an exhibition designed to titillate and shock.
How do you react to seeing a man standing, flayed of his skin, his internal organs on view, his muscles brick red, his blue eyes staring out at you? Or what about the trio posed round a table playing poker? You may have seen them in the film Casino Royale. James Bond stays cool. His interest is not the plastinates but how the villain manipulates their chips.
There was no Daniel Craig the day I visited the exhibition, but a crowd of people, all intensely curious and fascinated. Body Worlds, the controversial exhibition of plastinated human bodies, isn’t voyeuristic. It isn’t the Chamber of Horrors. It turned out to be earnestly educational. And compelling.
The only plastinate I personally found disturbing was the man holding his flayed skin in his hands, but I had recently seen much the same in Jusepe de Ribera’s painting of Apollo flaying Marsyas. Ribera painted to disturb. Plastinates are made to intrigue and inform.
They are the brainchild of anatomist Dr Gunther von Hagens of Heidelberg. Looking for improved teaching aids for his students, he had the idea of impregnating anatomical specimens with plastic. Lay people were intrigued, so he created exhibitions for the general public. He worked out how to plastinate whole bodies, not just of humans – this exhibition includes a man on a rearing horse.
I was surprised that all the human bodies appeared so slim. But they have been stripped of their fat. Forty years ago most people were that lean. Since then we have become accustomed to a population with a thick padding of adipose tissue.
Doctors know how few patients understand the working of their own body. Body Worlds aims to change that. It seems to be succeeding, to judge from the rapt attention visitors bestowed, not just to whole bodies, but to specimens of individual organs. How many people know where their kidneys are and how they work? Or how black a smoker’s lungs are? The information content is serious and substantial, but leavened with videos, cartoons, interactive demonstrations and quotes from sages from Confucius to Kant. You can’t take photos in the exhibition so visitors really engage with what’s on show.
From start to finish the emphasis is on the damaging effects of modern life and what you can do to mitigate them. I did not expect to go to Body Worlds and find myself encouraged to take deep breaths to reduce stress. But I did – and some weeks later I still do.
Around 50 million people around the world have seen versions of Body Worlds, and the overwhelmingly positive comments on TripAdvisor justify Dr von Hagens' mission. As always, there are some who claim to have got nothing out of the experience. And some who complained about the cost. It isn’t cheap – £24 for a ticket bought online, £28 at the door, although curiously entry to the shows in continental Europe is less than €20.
Yes, I was made uneasy. But it wasn’t squeamishness that disturbed me. It was speculating about the provenance of the bodies. In China the lucrative market for kidney transplants was, and may still be, fed by ‘donations’ from executed prisoners. Suspicions have been voiced that Body Worlds’ bodies come from the same source. The trafficking of cadavers and the manufacture of plastinated bodies and body parts are big business in China, particularly in the city of Dalian. The general manager of Dalian’s biggest company was taught plastination by Dr von Hagens, who also seems to have been involved in the business.
So, were the bodies in Body Worlds obtained from what we would regard as an ethical source and with full voluntary consent? Voluntary donations, unclaimed bodies and judicial executions could not possibly supply sufficient fresh corpses for China’s plastination industry. So where do they come from? Many new prisons and a cadaver processing plant have been built ne...