Peter Porcupine has a great blog post regarding this on his blog. I have always believed that something was amiss as Peter does with this exhibit. I thought it was disgusting and have refused to go to the Museum of Science because of it. I’ve told them so. Here’s Peter’s blog post. The German magazine Der Spiegel broke the news. People told me I was crazy when I told them that the corpses were of Chinese government, for lack of a better word, slaves. Guess Peter and I were right.
It has now been learned that they are worse then John Does – they are, instead, victims of Chinese torture and execution. The anonymous Chinese corpses come from the plastination lab at Dalian Medical University in China, operated by a former partner of plastination pioneer and anatomist Gunther von Hagens of “Body Worlds” fame. von Hagens himself has served as a visiting professor at Dalian Medical University, and for some of his international plastination exhibits he received from China the corpses of apparently-executed prisoners. While, in North America, Body Worlds is now touring in three versions, in Europe it has disappeared, having gone unexhibited since 2004. For in that year, the German newsweekly Der Spiegel published a lengthy expose of von Hagens, the burden of which was that at least some of his subjects showed evidence of bullet holes in the back of the neck, the preferred Chinese method of executing prisoners. Der Speigel obtained proof of $300 ‘body runs’ and reported that many of the posed figures were members of the banned Falun Gong sect.
what i find almost as disturbing as the body origin possibility are the poses some of the cadavers are placed in. i think there is a fine line between showing the amazing human body in motion and using human bodies as pop culture mannequins. i also have refused to see the exhibition, although i can’t avoid pictures of it on billboards and websites.
I’ve refused to go to the Museum too, I can’t believe it’s doing this. Even if the bodies were from people who consented and died naturally, displaying them as “mannequins” as you say is debasing. Massachusetts has laws against this sort of thing.
Here’s a May 30th NYT article about a similar exhibition in NYC (it does not say if this exhibit is connected to Body Worlds):
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p>So my questions are:
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p>My immediate reaction is the United States should be very strict about allowing human bodies and body parts into the country: brain tissue from Oxford diligently verified to be on the up-and-up by the receiving institution in the US – cool. Any human remain from China, irrespective of which country it was plastinated or anything else in – get lost.
or so i’ve heard.
I hate to say it, but the only way I can deal with something this ugly will probably be to digest it as a poem. Ugh Ugh Ugh Ugh Ugh Ugh Ugh Ugh Ugh Ugh Ugh
There are apparently two plastination centers: one in Dalian, China, and the other in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Frankly, I’d be dubious about the origins of cadavers from either location.
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p>Certainly von Hagens’ exhibits are not without controversy, but it should be noted that von Hagen’s won the subsequent lawsuit against Der Spiegel. Von Hagens claims that all cadavers used in the Body Worlds exhibits were obtained on the up-and-up — a claim verified by a commission set up by the California Science Center in 2004. HOWEVER, there are copycat exhibits that do not necessarily hold themselves to the same standard, and that is definitely troublesome.
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p>There is more on the legal accusations against von Hagens here.
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p>FWIW, the Guardian reports:
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p>And Snopes has a little more.
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p>I did see the Body Worlds exhibit at the MoS a couple of years ago. It was interesting enough, but I don’t have any overwhelming desire to go back — at least in part due to the questionable “provenance” of the cadavers.
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p>Controversy aside, I think exhibits like Body Worlds do in general present an excellent educational opportunity. Tricycle magazine arranged an updated version of the traditional Buddhist charnel ground meditation at the copycat “Bodies” exhibit in New York. (The Times gave the following report.) Also in conjunction with the Body World exhibit, in 2006 the Boston MoS hosted an interesting lecture by Jon Kabat-Zinn on the nature of the mind-body relationship (audio/video here.)
What can you learn from a plasticized human body that you couldn’t have learned from a plastic mannequin?
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p>I understand using cadavers in medical training — there’s no fugazi body parts that are as effective in training. However, we’re talking about looking at these bodies only, and that requires no more than the plastic statues found in doctor’s offices.
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p>These plasticized bodies are the bodies of people, and deserve more dignity than they’re getting. For the record, I also refuse to go see mummies for the same reason, ever since I saw them in Cairo and really thought about the fact that these are people on display in little more than a carnival freak show exhibit.
When I say it was “interesting enough” I came away from the exhibit with the same sense: the cadavers might just have well been highly detailed mannequins for all I could tell, and in that sense the exhibit was a bit underwhelming in light of the hype.
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p>I think the education part comes in when visitors — and remember, in most cases we’re not talking about medical students — do make the connection between the cadavers and themselves: “Yeah; that WAS once a real person…. And that’s what I look like inside, too.” It brings the biology home in a visceral way.
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p>I certainly understand and respect your reaction regarding the treatment of the cadavers — and the dignity or lack thereof — but in a sense it’s not really much different that using a cadaver to teach medical students: no model can really replicate the real thing. While the comments above raise legitimate questions about the origins of the cadavers in these exhibits, there is also no doubt the many bodies were donated to von Hagens with this express purpose in mind. And while von Hagens and others may be blurring the line between education and commercial exploitation, and isn’t donating one’s body to science — in a broad sense — as laudable a legacy as any?
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p>What’s interesting is how much of our reaction to the bodies seems to be due to our cultural filters. I think it’s important to recognize that the “plastinates” were indeed people once upon a time, but the fact of the matter is that the person just ain’t there anymore: the bodies, in effect, are indeed just mannequins.
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p>Different cultures have different attitudes regarding the dead. One of the classical trainings for Buddhist monks, for example, is to sit at night in the charnel grounds bearing witness to the decomposition and cremation of dead bodies:
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p>In Tibet there is a similar tradition of the so-called “sky burial”.
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p>In each case the part of the “lesson” is the disidentification of the self and the body: that the person and the physical body are not one in the same, and that once the conditions for “personhood” have passed away, the body is essentially a hunk of dead meat.
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p>In our culture we not only tend to sublimate illness, death, and dying, but we also tend to cling to our personification of the body in both life and death. Intentionally or not, what von Hagens and his ilk have done in part is to expose these latent feelings towards our bodies and bring them to the fore.
Only I spoke about Sophocles and ‘Antigone’ rather than Tibetan burial rituals. Because I DO live in and appreciate Western civilization.
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p>The use of volunteers was questionable; the use of those executed, in order to make a quick buck off their ‘piece of meat’ is reprehensible.
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p>As now I am, so you will be; So, Stranger, stop and Pray for Me.
your post reminded me of a similar running argument about the morality of zoos. what is the fair balance between keeping other beings captive at our whim, vs. educating our kids to value wildlife? it is an ongoing debate with many correct answers.
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p>as for the plasticized bodies, if i was certain they had been voluntarily donated by their former inhabitants for this purpose, i’d have no problem with the exhibit at all. in fact, i’d be curious to see it. i think you’re right that there is likely a visceral (great pun, btw!) response to seeing real bodies that would be lacking if you viewed plastic models. a good exhibition plays on emotion as well as intellect, and real cadavers have that potential in spades. let’s just hope that real spades weren’t used to dig up the cadavers!
Humans have souls, animals don’t. For humans, death ceremony is an important part of the life cycle, both for the dead and those remaining living. The same is generally not true for animals.
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p>In another outlook, wild animals [not pets] aren’t important as individuals; they’re only important as a species. In that sense, keeping individuals captive is largely irrelevant. Of course, many zoos do research on the animals, something they can’t do if the animals aren’t there.
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p>If the human cadaver can provide something useful for humanity that a plastic model can’t, then using the cadaver may be appropriate. If the plastic model serves just as well — and it seems to me that it would in this science museum case — then using a human corpse is something that makes me uncomfortable enough to avoid the exhibit.
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p>If the human didn’t outright volunteer to be exhibited, then exhibiting the corpse is outright morally reprehensible in my opinion, and it doesn’t matter if the corpse used to be a Chinese prisoner or a Pharaoh.
How do you know? Did you check? What would our Hindu friends say?
then my cats do too. If they don’t, then I don’t.
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p>Those who have watched enough nature specials on TV know that rituals and mourning are not uniquely human traits. We’ve heard the nighttime wails of Koko the gorilla, slumped up against the wall of her trailer, in the days after she was told that Michael had died. We’ve seen a mother gorilla carry around the two-day old corpse of her murdered baby. We’ve watched elephants gather around and stroke the bones of their relatives.
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p>Yes, we differ from other mammals — in degree, not in kind.
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It’s “for me”. For me, and members of the Roman Catholic Church that is. At least, according to Father Metzler, my childhood priest. Obviously, there’s no science behind it, no evidence, no way to measure, and everyone is welcome to their own beliefs and opinions and religions on the matter.
That higher levels of fauna, such as elephants, dolphins, and gorillas probably have souls, but not so much ants, bees and mice.
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p>I hope cats don’t either.
because to me some animals seem aware and to have souls, whereas some people appear to have no soul at all. so i’ve never been able to make definitive statements such as you have, and am not sure i ever will be able to. for this reason i try to err on the side of caution and respect animals as if they were people. not always possible, but often it is.
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p>Ah, the annals of medical history