Sex, death and 'Bodies'
An exhibit of corpses is back for a second tour of Seattle, where it has been a huge hit. What are we really experiencing when we wander the gallery of the dead?
I grew up surrounded by body parts.
My father was a physician, a pathologist and a medical illustrator, and he worked largely out of labs and studios in our family basement. His medical book collection lined the walls of my parents' bedroom. My sister and I spent hours examining pictures and texts in such glorious tomes as Gould & Pyle's Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, a veritable freak show of medical history, from two-headed humans to the miseries of elephantiasis of the scrotum, fully illustrated.
In the basement, there were human skulls, reassembled bones mounted and showing the nervous system of the hand, weird rubber replicas of the digestive system. In a large ceramic crock lived a human stomach, white like a giant, waterlogged noodle. I used to sneak kids into the basement and whip off the crock's lid for 5 cents a person to give them a gander at a genuine human stomach. The smell of the formaldehyde that wafted up was so strong that most fled in horror without ever seeing it, but I, a grade-school P.T. Barnum, had made my candy money for the week.
The walls were lined with other specimens, mostly from heart research. Human and animal arteries flattened and stretched out like dried animal skins, resting in jars of fluids. When Woodland Park Zoo's Bobo the gorilla died in 1968, a piece of his heart wound up in my father's lab for scrutiny. The stuffed and preserved Bobo can still be seen in the basement of the Museum of History and Industry.
The most visible guest, however, was Mr. Bones, a full human skeleton that hung like a drycleaned suit in the corner of one room. Mr. Bones was not even a Mr., according to my father. Having examined it, he believed it was a woman from India whose corpse had been cleaned and put back together for medical research and teaching. We never really discussed who she was or where she came from or why she had wound up in our home instead of burned, buried, or scattered on the Ganges as her cultural customs might have dictated. Mr. Bones, or Ms. Bones, simply was, and my father and mother (who was herself a nurse) delighted in teaching us about anatomy by pointing to various bones and telling us their names. My parents used to urge my sisters and me to clean our plates because of "the starving people in India." I assumed the skeleton was one of many such unfortunates, lucky enough to be a teaching tool in the afterlife. We were taught that it's an honor to be of use after death, as an organ donor, specimen, or cadaver.
Health and medicine are largely about death, staving it off, but also learning from it. My father was devoted to making medical knowledge more accessible, clearer, understandable to the lay person. Together with our family pediatrician, my parents even co-authored the 1960 children's classic, A Visit to the Doctor, a piece of propaganda designed to make kids respect medical authority and allay their fears of physicians. In A Visit to the Doctor, booster shots don't even hurt. I knew that wasn't true from first-hand experience, and I always got the sense my folks were a bit ashamed of the book for not being more realistic. The little boy in the book was not encouraged to donate his mortal remains to science, but I imagine my parents could have made that case in a sequel.
Visit to the Doctor was a sham, but I had also seen graphic realism. I remember that, when I was way too young to see such things, my father created color photo panels for a medical exhibition downtown. It featured graphic photographs of a man's face as it healed over time, and with surgery, from a suicide attempt with a gun that left the victim alive but with most of his mouth shot away. It was hideous, but also an extraordinary lesson in healing: that someone so mangled could recover was a kind of revelation to me. Such gore is seen routinely nowadays by the CSI generation.
Medical gore is always that: fascinating and revelatory. There is something lurid about it, but also instructive. The Seattle "Bodies" exhibit is back in town (through March) after its successful run here a couple of years ago, and it embodies the best and worst of our fascination with graphic displays of corpses and body parts (they of course have a Facebook page). The appeal is the chance to see "actual human specimens." And this is a centuries old fascination, as old as the medical profession itself, and certainly ritualized and popularized in the past few hundred years as medical knowledge has exploded.
The creation of the printed book allowed for the dramatic renderings of body parts, gained from secret dissections of executed criminals, or corpses that had been stolen for the purpose. Prints in the Renaissance showed men and women with their abdomens open, happily displaying their innards. Look at the 16th century illustrations of Vesalius and you'll see figures posed exactly as you might in "Bodies." During the Enlightenment, dissection became a chance to reveal and document the workings of the human machine, the "curious engine" mentioned by Robert Boyle.
The books fueled interest in people seeing live demonstrations of bodies being opened, peeled and cut apart. The operating room literally was a "theater" in which men of science, and often the voyeuristic public, could see corpses reduced to their mysterious parts. Histories of dissection often note the subtext of sexual buzz of people seeing naked bodies while the living were dressed in the heavy dark garb of a Rembrandt painting.
Some scholars have noted that public dissections were a way of demonstrating power and dominance, of asserting medical authority and reinforcing the power of scientific knowledge. Think of the hotties who perform autopsies on the various CSI shows: Forensic investigation is sexy, and always rights wrongs. (The power of this is demonstrated in what is known as the "CSI Effect," a public overconfidence in police science.) Sex and death are old partners.
The "Bodies" exhibits show off remarkable technological feats of preservation of corpses — people who have been cut in half vertically, as if by chain saw, or who've had their organs perfectly "plastinated" and embalmed for us to examine. People today are sensitive to where the bodies we gawk at come from: Are they criminals, the indigent? Most are "unclaimed" and from China, which is the new "India" as a source of corpses. Before that, Medieval Europeans were once obsessed with inhaling "mummy dust" for their health and harvested the bodies of dead Egyptians.
There are clearly race issues involved: The bodies exhibited are often talked about as being unwanted and from places that have people in abundance. I often wonder if "Bodies" exhibits would be as popular if it were your grandma or grandpa from Akron up there, known and named, the all-American white people who died from too much beef, corn, and Jell-o salad. Such exhibits are more palatable if we don't identify with the corpses on display, if they remain anonymous and foreign, if we're able to convince ourselves that something wasted or profane has been put to good use. We can be glad that a homeless person or criminal or diseased individual is contributing to society, making lemonade from the lemon of death.
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Comments:
Posted Wed, Nov 18, 6:51 a.m. Inappropriate
Yes, the "Bodies" exhibit does share sacred relics -- the cadavers of Chinese prisoners who never agreed that their remains be on permanent display to raise money for their government. Before seeing "Bodies" take time -- unlike Knute -- to dig into the real story of where these bodies came from. Seattle needs a law, like San Francisco, that requires displays like this to include proof of permission from those whose corpses will be displayed. Until "Bodies" is required to do this it'll continue to buy corpses of prisoners from the Chinese government, the only place that uses the bodies of its people to titillate gawkers around the world.
Posted Wed, Nov 18, 8 a.m. Inappropriate
Agree with RevSandy -- I won't give money to the Bodies exhibit because of the odd nature of its business: presenting bodies of people without their prior consent, and charging for it. I'd make a donation to see the same in a museum, if the bodies were from consenting individuals (and no doubt I'd be in awe and get the whim-whams at the same time). Regardless, Knute, thanks so much for your wonderful personal story and also for the link to the visible human body website.
Posted Wed, Nov 18, 8:28 a.m. Inappropriate
I wonder what the public reaction would be if these were bodies of white or black people?
Posted Wed, Nov 18, 9:58 a.m. Inappropriate
I, too, have read of the controversy involving the exhibit; but I opted to view it on its first pass through Seattle. I found it to be absolutely fascinating, except for the fetus portion which was disturbing. (I can't say I wasn't warned. There were signs and an opportunity to bypass that particular gallery, but I chose to view it. My own warning based on that experience: Parents, if you take your kids do not take them into that part!)
To me, this gets into one's personal/religious values about what our "empty vessels" mean after we are no longer in them. In the end, I guess I thought of it as somehow honoring or giving value to the lives of these people whose lives were obviously so different from mine, who perished under bad circumstances.
Posted Wed, Nov 18, 11:22 a.m. Inappropriate
This exhibit is about the profit. Yes, the organizers say it is for "educational purposes", but they would not be doing it if they could not make gobs of money. To me, that seems sacrilegious.
I also flash on the scary, creepy feeling of the scene in Planet of the Apes when I was a kid where Taylor comes upon his shipmate stuffed and mounted in the museum. It is one thing to donate your body for research, another to have it peeled and posed into a public spectacle (without your permission). It seems so gloriously disrespectful.
There, but for the whims of circumstance, stand you or I.
Posted Wed, Nov 18, 1:36 p.m. Inappropriate
I loved this story. Well done, Knute. When I was younger and living in Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry displayed a human corpse, cut into thin sections and preserved in formalin between sheets of glass. You could flip through the "pages" just like a book. You could also tell, from the half-inch-thick strips of preserved skin, that the corpse was of African-American descent. BTW, the museum also featured a giant, walk-thru human heart, which apparently was inaccurately painted to represent a "dead" heart. I recall it was later repainted-- maybe it's still there, lub-dubbing electronically for all to enjoy.
Posted Wed, Nov 18, 2:39 p.m. Inappropriate
I also agree that the exhibit is a money making endevor at the expense of nonconsenting individuals. Yes it is very helpful for medical student to have the experience of examining the human body, but I believe it is wrong to make public unnatural poses of unwilling deceased human beings. I wouldn't want it to happen to me or my loved ones. Therefore I won't be seeing the exhibit.
Posted Wed, Nov 18, 3:56 p.m. Inappropriate
"Bodies" is a ripoff version of "Body Worlds" (a rough English translation of "Korperwelt", the original German title). The latter bills itself as "the Original Exhibition of Real Human Bodies," and is run by the acclaimed anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who invented (and patented) the modern plastination techniques on which these exhibits are based. Dr. Hagens' exhibits make a point of using only the bodies of persons who had freely consented to donate them for such purposes. As Dr. Hagens is based in Europe, most of the specimens displayed in the "Body Worlds" shows are European (and therefore 'white'). So for those who wonder whether such displays of 'freely donated' bodies by 'white' persons might either look different or be reacted to differently, "Body Worlds" offer the chance to test such theories. I just wish that these would come to Seattle rather than their opportunistic second cousins. (I once bought a ticket to see the "Bodies" show in NYC--because I was fooled into thinking it was the one by von Hagens, which I had heard about before and was interested in seeing. I asked the girl at the ticket window if the show was the one by Dr. Hagens, and she said "Yes." So I bought the $23 ticket. Once I reached the exhibit entrance--which was on a different level of the building--, I saw a big plaque denying any involvement with Dr. Hagens. I immediately turned on my heels and attempted to get my money back. But my request was denied. As I rode down the elevator to the exit, I ostentatiously tore up my ticket and threw the pieces into the air. That has been my only experience with "Bodies.")
Posted Wed, Nov 18, 9:01 p.m. Inappropriate
Excellent meditation on the exhibit. The nicely turned dactylic hexameter of "a full human skeleton that hung like a dry cleaned suit in the corner of one room" is, itself, worth the price of admission. Two issues emerge: 1) is a corpse worthy of human dignity or does the science of anatomy trump dignity, stripping the body from the person, and 2) what is fueling the CSI obsession in the TV viewing public? Why does that public want to probe the viscera of victims? My guess is that Berger is on to something in the psychosexual nature of this, but why has this become a social fascination now? Is it the wars we're in or, maybe, a parallel to the stripping away of our private identity via technology and surveillance, medicine and science?
Thanks for a thought-provoking piece.
Posted Thu, Nov 19, 8:33 a.m. Inappropriate
Thought-provoking comments, too! I'm creeped out by "Bodies" because they use bodies of nonconsenting and likely murdered people. This piece reminds me that such practices are nothing new, that "Bodies" is just the latest in a long seamy tradition of resurrection men profiting by desecrating the dead. It would be good to have the chance to see a Dr. Hagens exhibit--same technology, but using bodies of people who'd volunteered to participate in it--and then meditate on the cultural questions it would raise.
Posted Thu, Nov 19, 3:40 p.m. Inappropriate
Thanks Mossback for a great reflection on the exhibit, and the great discussion it has raised. To add to BKochis's comment: I also think the question of why we want the inside story on other peoples' insides may have to do with our estrangement from death. For most of history, and still in many places in the world, death was/is domestic: my grandmother and her sisters laid out their mother on the kitchen table when she died, washed and dressed her, and carried her to the living room so relatives could say a formal goodbye. For many of us, death is cinematic, experienced only on film--so why not go see a really cool show with dead people, which probably teaches the average person as little about anatomy and physiology as the History Channel conveys about the messy realities of history? It strikes me too that the sidewalk shrines that appear spontaneously to honor the dead contain a lot more than a tribute to the individual killed on the spot. They hold our collective awe and reverence for a power that eludes and terrifies us, but is made comfortable and accessible by opening antiseptic, anonymous bodies.
Posted Fri, Nov 20, 4:42 p.m. Inappropriate
Great news about Galileo's body parts: two fingers and a tooth recovered (and no, not from my family's basement!):
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1103ap_eu_italy_galileos_fingers.html
Posted Fri, Nov 27, 1:45 p.m. Inappropriate
My suspicion has always been that the bodies displayed might be those of late Chinese prisoners, who never agreed to being dissected and plastinated. Another poster on this page mentions this as fact. If this is the case with even one of these bodies, the whole exhibition is an outrage. It is bad enough that the stupid exhibition had to come to Seattle once, without having it "revived" a second time. If people want to display anatomy, make sculptures without cadaver parts, but let the dead rest in peace; or direct students to some well chosen anatomy texts. Personally, I find no fascination in cruel and ghoulish displays, however "educational" its advertisers claim they are.
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