Body Worlds: Home Version

February 6, 2008 2:00 AM

Love "Body Worlds,"(previously) but wish you didn't have to say goodbye to all those exquisite corpses upon leaving the exhibit hall? Well, now you can bring a slice home with you.

In addition to having been discussed previously in the blue, Body Worlds has served as the location for a Metafilter Meetup. I felt a little dirty then, and a now even a bit dirtier. Somehow the hat makes it worse.

posted by contraption (57 comments total)

The universally intact female nipples are what left me feeling dirtiest. Eternally chilly, poor girls.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 2:06 AM on February 6, 2008

Sorry, but when I take home a slice of human corpse, I like it to be fresh, not plastinated. Plastination would completely ruin the flavour.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 2:12 AM on February 6, 2008 [2 favorites]

Ah, but it's easier to build a fort with plastinated slices.
posted by whir at 2:46 AM on February 6, 2008 [1 favorite]

Sorry, but when I take home a slice of human corpse, I like it to be fresh, not plastinated. Plastination would completely ruin the flavour.

Do what I do with old pizza. Spray a little water on it and put it in the microwave for about 30-40 seconds.
posted by chillmost at 3:13 AM on February 6, 2008

From the article:

According to the mass circulation daily Bild, von Hagens, famous for developing the patented Plastination technique for preserving corpses, has come up with a new business model involving selling cross-sections of bodies prepared in his "Plastinarium" workshop in Guben on the German-Polish border.

Until now, he has only sold cross-sections, where plastinated organs are clearly visible, to universities as teaching materials. But now private individuals will be able to buy slices of corpses too. Von Hagens' assistant Nadine Diwersi told the newspaper: "We are able to quickly produce large quantities with high quality and for a good price."

posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:02 AM on February 6, 2008 [1 favorite]

"Anatomist Dr. Gunther Von Hagens Clarafies: Plastinates Not For Sale"
posted by Blingo at 4:10 AM on February 6, 2008

Huh. It says people donate their bodies to him 'for free' and not all of them specify 'for scientific use only'... but still, surely just plain hawking them for profit without (I presume) kicking anything back to the families of the deceased is at least a bit dishonest?
posted by Drexen at 4:16 AM on February 6, 2008

I actually looked into buying a plastinated airway at one point (since I work at a medical school, I could buy one) but it was expensive (several thousand dollars, I believe) and it was unclear if it could stand being handled daily by med students and residents, so I passed.
posted by TedW at 4:23 AM on February 6, 2008

Too expensive. I'll wait for the cheaper knock-offs to hit the market.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:25 AM on February 6, 2008

There is only 1 result on google for "diy plastination" and 6 for "home plastination". I have to fix this.
posted by Dr. Curare at 5:03 AM on February 6, 2008 [1 favorite]

Plastination would completely ruin the flavour.

I don't care. I have a recurring dream where the latest food item de jour is a dismembered human hand served in a styrofoam tray and I'm always thinking "I know it's cool but I will never get used to that." And given my other recurring dream, taking the wrong turn in the hospital and having to wade through various intact and dismembered cadavers just like those in first year gross anatomy lab, I would prefer to avoid the whole corpse thing altogether, thank you very much.

(That is actually true: my daughter begged me to take her to Body Worlds when it came to Vancouver Science World but I was honestly grossed out and wouldn't take her, even though I had spent a year of my life elbow deep and a real dead person and would have thought I'd be immune by this point.)

That is all.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 5:09 AM on February 6, 2008 [1 favorite]

I know I lack the motivation to actually build it, but I claim credit to the idea of salad bowls made of palstinated steaks.
posted by Dr. Curare at 5:20 AM on February 6, 2008 [1 favorite]

Hand over the jerky, turkey.

Give us the salt-beef, chief.

Pass me the plastinated face, ace.
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 5:27 AM on February 6, 2008

I claim credit to the idea of salad bowls made of plastinated steaks! And copyright! There! Your typo was my win. :p
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 5:28 AM on February 6, 2008

Hands are actually among the best parts of the body to eat, I was told by an ex-cannibal in New Guinea. Other best bits are ribs and buttocks.

What it tastes like? Actually, not chicken. More like pork, but largely depends on the health and diet of the eatee.
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 5:30 AM on February 6, 2008

If you ate a vegetarian missionary, it could be called corn-fed prig.
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 5:31 AM on February 6, 2008

Boy do I see a Law & Order: CI episode in the making. "Home plastination" indeed.
posted by fuse theorem at 5:54 AM on February 6, 2008

Gunther von Hagens looks exactly like I thought he would.
posted by voltairemodern at 6:21 AM on February 6, 2008

Also, I miss the img tag right now. The first photo of him in that gallery is absolutely begging to have a Dracula-esque black coak and collar photoshopped onto it.
posted by voltairemodern at 6:22 AM on February 6, 2008

Will these come in wallet sized?
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 6:38 AM on February 6, 2008

Why on earth is that "stomach-churning?" What a hysterical tone to the article about selling the parts.

LOVED Body Worlds. I wish it was a permanent exhibit in my city.
posted by agregoli at 6:45 AM on February 6, 2008

I always found it funny how Body Worlds is often exhibited in science museums and kids are encouraged to view it for its scientific merits. The irony is that skin was left on the bodies, they would never be shown anywhere, and kids would never see it.

You can see bodies wearing clothes on top of skin, and you can see flayed bodies with the skin removed. You just can't see bodies with the skin showing. Weird.
posted by Pastabagel at 6:55 AM on February 6, 2008

...if the skin was left on...

grrr
posted by Pastabagel at 6:56 AM on February 6, 2008

Gunther Van Hagens and his plastinated corpses creep me out. It seems so disrespectful to human life. Can you imagine being confronted by the plastinated body of someone you knew or cared about? Nightmare inducing! To my loved ones: Please make sure my mortal remains are cremated so I don't wind up in this guys creepshow.
posted by Daddy-O at 7:11 AM on February 6, 2008

Needs a 'batshitgerman' tag.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:26 AM on February 6, 2008

Pastabagel? I'm confused, I'm positive I saw skin left on, including breasts and partially flayed penis, etc. Did we see the same show?

How is it disrespectful, Daddy-O? All the participants in Body Worlds agreed to it, far as I know. Presumably you would know if someone you cared about had their body plastinated. They even have a sign-up area at the end of the show if you are interested in plastination. It's actually an awe-inspiring show, to see the amazing nitty-gritty of our bodies. Much more informative in the beauty of the body than anything else I've seen.
posted by agregoli at 7:31 AM on February 6, 2008

Agregoli: I guess it just seems creepy to me. Obviously it is interesting to some people, but to me it is disturbing to see what was once a living breathing person with thoughts, emotions and feelings to be in a permanent state of disection. Morbid, to me at least.
posted by Daddy-O at 7:44 AM on February 6, 2008

Proof that ManBeef.com was only slightly ahead of its time.
posted by briank at 8:01 AM on February 6, 2008

Curious - Do you find anatomy classes morbid too? I find Body Worlds imparting a lot of knowledge too - but to laypeople instead of doctors. For instance, my favorite part of Body Worlds was seeing how many blood vessels are involved in the head. I had no idea. It was one of the most gorgeous things I've ever seen, and knowing that's inside EVERY PERSON gives me a newfound appreciation for how complicated our bodies are. I just can't put a price tag on the value of sharing that kind of knowledge with people.

Personally, once a person dies, I no longer see them as anything - their thoughts, emotions, what made them THEM is gone. Completely. The body after death is really a shell, a useless bag of organs and bones, etc. That doesn't mean we shouldn't respect a dead person's wishes regarding their body - but these people wanted to use their bodies after death for this purpose.

At any rate, I encourage you to see it if it comes around near you - you sound like the type of person who might get the most out of it.
posted by agregoli at 8:04 AM on February 6, 2008

I once worked at a medical school where human cadavers were used for the gross anatomy classes. They had a "cadaver swimming pool" where the donated bodies were left to soak in formaldehyde. Once preserved, the cadavers were fished out with a loop going around their torsos under their arms. There was an electric hoist suspended from a track in the ceiling for lifting them and moving them around the morgue. I will never forget seeing the bloated cadaver of an old woman hanging from the hoist dripping with formaldehyde. You could always tell when med students had just come from gross anatomy from the lingering smell of formaldehyde. My mother had made arrangements to donate her body to this med school when she passed away, but after I worked there for a while I asked her not to. Stumbling across her preserved body being dismantled by med students in gross anatomy class would have haunted me forever.
posted by Daddy-O at 8:31 AM on February 6, 2008 [4 favorites]

I'll stick to anatomical drawings, thanks. My organs will be much more useful to someone through donation than to be a spectacle in a freak show.
posted by loiseau at 8:50 AM on February 6, 2008

I regularly sport pinstripes and a fedora, and I'm informed that pictures of me prompt girly coos (which confuses no one more than me). I have a natural accent - I am often thought to be either British or Eastern European.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 8:58 AM on February 6, 2008 [3 favorites]

I'll be looking to invest in some third-world countries nacent commercial body-parts industries. I bet they can produce a chopped-up human for less than half the price of this german junk.

Mmmmm, plastination; It tastes like genocide!
posted by blue_beetle at 8:59 AM on February 6, 2008

Wow, Daddy-O. I've never heard of a "cadavar swimming pool" set-up. Interesting.

(Note to loiseau - many of the samples in the Body World's show are diseased and not worth giving to anyone - they had diseased lungs, livers, hearts, etc).
posted by agregoli at 9:20 AM on February 6, 2008

To be honest, I got no usable knowledge from dissecting a human cadaver. It is so much easier to conceptualize anatomy and understand how things work but looking at sketches in books. Eventually I stopped going to gross anatomy lab in med school and still got a high pass on the final exam. The tone in the lab was mostly black humor (I mean how else can you possibly even *be* in a room with 25 torn apart human bodies) and it seemed really disrespectful.

So yeah, projecting my own experience onto everyone else, I feel like people's interest in Body Worlds is voyeuristic. If you're really curious about anatomy in a scientific sense, go read Netter.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:27 AM on February 6, 2008

So yeah, projecting my own experience onto everyone else, I feel like people's interest in Body Worlds is voyeuristic.

Ouch. Personally, that's not my game. I've never dissected a human cadaver, and most people never will. I was truly awed and impressed with seeing the human body in a way I could never view it, books included. It was a valuable experience for me and my husband, which is why I encourage others to go.
posted by agregoli at 9:32 AM on February 6, 2008

By the way, I did not mean to offend anyone who finds Bodyworks interesting for scientific or educational reasons. I meant no criticism.

I guess my feelings on it are just the product of misplaced and inappropriate empathy or something.

I'm not sure I understand it myself.
posted by Daddy-O at 9:35 AM on February 6, 2008

I hereby nominate the term "Plastinated" as a new alternative to drunk or otherwise chemically altered:

"Dude, this weekend we are going to a meetup. Wanna come along? We are going to get completely plastinated!"
posted by quin at 10:06 AM on February 6, 2008

To Slarty Bartfast: Honestly, it amazes me that you could even say the you got no useful knowledge from working on cadavers. Pictures in books may give you the answers for tests, but you just can't get a good feel for the three dimensional layout of everything inside a body from pictures. You can''t get a feel for how delicate the inside of a human body is from a book.

I was lucky and I had the opportunity to work on cadavers at the junior college I went to (Orange Coast College in Orange County, California). I really enjoyed it and got quite a bit out of it, even if I did screw up that class. IMHO, there is no possible way books could replace working on a real cadaver. The cadaver work was a wonderful addition to regular academic studies.

At the time they were setting up their own plastination lab, to sell plastinated samples to other schools and such.
posted by webnrrd2k at 10:09 AM on February 6, 2008

I was being a little facetious about people who enjoyed Body Worlds, of course.

But with cadavers, for one thing, a living body is totally different than a preserved one. After having my hands in a cold corpse and also a warm surgical patient, it's a totally different thing. Anatomy is supposed to teach you concepts -- here is where the kidney lies and this is it's relationship to the vasculature, etc. That kind of thing is much easier to grasp without everything else in the cadaver's body getting in the way. That, and the fact that it seemed like we would spend hours and hours dissecting some internal organ just to look at it when I could have opened a book and in 5 minutes understand how it looked.

Oh yeah, and dead bodies are weird and gross and I simply never got over that.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 10:17 AM on February 6, 2008

I've been spending my lunch hour (yum!) thinking about working on a cadaver and if I could actually do such a thing. I'd like to think I could, but as I've never been that close to a cadaver that was not plastinated or in a casket, I really don't know.
posted by agregoli at 10:17 AM on February 6, 2008

What a lovely lampshade idea!

Oh darn, someone thought of that already.

even if it wasn't actually implemented...
posted by CynicalKnight at 10:52 AM on February 6, 2008

The news here (UK) is the Bishop of Manchester's complaint about the show: Bishop condemns corpse exhibition. The Institute for Plastination responds. A number of people have suggested a counter-complaint about his lot's obsession with displaying images of a bleeding near-naked man nailed to a cross.
posted by raygirvan at 11:13 AM on February 6, 2008

Gunther von Hagens looks exactly like I thought he would.

Separated at birth?

Josef Beuys/Gunther von Hagens
posted by PeterMcDermott at 11:26 AM on February 6, 2008

Hands are actually among the best parts of the body to eat

Only the hands of the bourgoisie. The hands of the proletariat are tough and scaly, and you need to cook them slowly for a long period to break down all that muscle and sinew.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 11:30 AM on February 6, 2008

Yeah Peter, but sometimes a braised janitor hand really hits the spot, home comforts and all that.
posted by Divine_Wino at 1:41 PM on February 6, 2008

Separated at birth?

Josef Beuys/Gunther von Hagens

I see it more like: present/past life.
posted by aldurtregi at 2:31 PM on February 6, 2008

It is so much easier to conceptualize anatomy and understand how things work but looking at sketches in books.

Slarty Bartfast: I agree completely. When you're looking at a patient your concept of 'anatomy,' in terms of your ability to diagnose their disease, is at best a cartoon version of real anatomy, and that is how it should be. Exceptions to this would be surgeons, who get to see real living anatomy every day during training, and doing procedures such as central line placement, which, equally, are guided by real-life trial and error rather than a dim memory of where the big veins are in a dried-out old corpse.

However, medicine is an extremely demanding enterprise that requires approaching people diffently than one normally does: remember your first physical exam and recall how unusual it is for normal people to observe, let alone palpate and auscultate, another's naked female chest. Proceeding through the dissection of a cadaver, in terms of the indoctrination into this separate priesthood, is of inestimable value. (And that was neither disingenuous nor snarky. Medicine requires a fundamental change in attitude from the civilian life, and this very scary experience is one thing that helps to accomplish that.)

Awaiting the "doctors as gods" comments now. ;-) ....
posted by Turtles all the way down at 3:03 PM on February 6, 2008

okay, "diffently," I meant that.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 3:05 PM on February 6, 2008

Oh yeah, and dead bodies are weird and gross and I simply never got over that.

Yep, pretty much what I, and evidently my unconscious mind, are sayin'.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 3:27 PM on February 6, 2008

When I was in med school, we used body parts to play a form of polo. Arms & hearts, around the slab. I forget the scoring system.

A dead body is not like a live one, of course, but you can't get experience of the human body from a drawing. Not using real bodies for training is what held back medicine for about a thousand years.

So, let's slice them fat bastards up.

Also, formaldehyde + PCP soaked joints. Great way to induce psychosis. cf. quidnunc kid
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 4:05 PM on February 6, 2008

Reminds me of a story. Gross anatomy lab of course happens in the fall of your first semester in med school. You form a tight bond with your classmates that is cemented by the shared experience of cutting the heads off of cadavers and staying up all night memorizing the amino acids. Round about October 31, everyone is pretty used to what most other people would consider a pretty grim day to day lifestyle, everyone's in need of about 15-20 strong drinks, and everyone has a pretty sick sense of humor.

My med school class decides it would be a good idea to throw a Halloween kegger in the basement of the med school which also houses the anatomy lab, which is of course is supposed to be locked up after hours. At the time, I was living in a group house with non-medical people - two law students, a school teacher, and an intern. So I invite them to the party.

Everyone gets good and toasted. There's a DJ, I am actually dressed up as cadaver. But my poor room mates have no idea what's behind that door. Late in the party someone discovers an unlocked door. With inhibitions lowered and judgment gone, my girlfriend (now a thoracic surgeon) and I introduce my room mates to our cadavers. Fortunately no one passed out or threw up, but I'm sure it was the creepiest Halloween ever for them.

What was I saying about being respectful in anatomy lab?
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 5:26 PM on February 6, 2008

Never say anything that might offend the cadavers. If regardless of your efforts you still offend a cadaver, apologize profusely.
posted by Dr. Curare at 6:08 PM on February 6, 2008

Personally I have to say that I'm glad that I went to see the first Body Worlds exhibit when it came to the California Science Center here in Los Angeles, even though my visceral response, particularly after seeing the plastinated pregnant woman -- cut open, with fetus still inside her -- was extreme nausea. For several days after going, I felt more embodied, more aware of my flesh-and-blood physicality, than I remember ever having been before, and I think it is not an overstatement to say that for me it was an epiphanic experience.

My biggest problem with Body Worlds (and this has probably been discussed previously on MeFi -- sorry, I'm a noob), is that it insists on its status as science -- in fact, that is how it has gained and maintains its credibility -- but it is at the same time strangely aesthetisized. If, as the website states, "The primary goal of BODY WORLDS is health education," then why the need for all of the posing of bodies, some of them with a strange sort of whimsical humor? I remember one flayed fellow wearing a hat, for example. Has an ethical line been crossed when one starts to find entertainment value in the posturing of human corpses?
posted by kaiserin at 9:52 PM on February 6, 2008

kaiserin, I agree. I don't really think it's Evil or anything to do what Body Worlds is doing (presuming that they're getting bodies from consenting people and not through sketchy Chinese connections, which is a rumour I've heard), but I remember the clear sense that they were getting away with something with all the "science" talk: they did have "This is your lung. This is your lung if you SMOKE." stuff, but mostly it was these whimsical things where various muscles are split for maximum graphical impact, or they were figure-skating or whatever.

It wasn't something I necessarily enjoyed, but it was an interesting experience.
posted by SoftRain at 10:35 PM on February 6, 2008

Yeah Peter, but sometimes a braised janitor hand really hits the spot, home comforts and all that.

I'm sure that's true Divine_Wino, but I'm the kind of guy who makes their living extracting surplus value from labour and my mom always taught me that's I should try and avoid biting the hand that feeds me.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:47 AM on February 7, 2008

I think that's what I like about it - it rides the line between science and art - for as how complex and completely technical you can make the body, it is still a glorious piece of art. I found great value in the whole bodies being posed doing ordinary things - for certain I didn't understand how muscles moved exactly until I saw clearly how they retract and expand for different physical poses. I find much more respect in these glorious expressions of what the body is and what it could do during life than someone being put into the ground after they die...Not that we would have room for all the plastinations if everyone wanted to do that. Would make for some interesting cemetaries though!
posted by agregoli at 7:57 AM on February 7, 2008