Body Worlds: Up Close and Personaltikichris

Poker playing trio from Casino Royale, reimagined for Body Worlds, photo courtesy Borkowski PR

So you thought you knew your own body? London’s newest museum makes sure you look again. Judith Schrut takes you inside Body Worlds.

Body Worlds is a newly opened museum ‘experience’ in central London which takes you on an intimate and explicit journey around the human body, literally under the skin.

Let’s be clear, Body Worlds is one incredible experience but it’s not for the faint hearted. The 200+ exhibits and displays feature genuine human corpses and body parts, donated by their former owners and preserved by an extraordinary process known as Plastination.

The Life Saver, photo Jeff Moore, courtesy Borkowski PR

The process was invented some years ago by legendary husband and wife medics, Gunther Von Hagens and Angelina Whalley. Since then Body Worlds has taken the form of a hugely popular travelling exhibition, seen by 47 million visitors in 130 countries.

Plastination is a lengthy and complex business but essentially involves stripping away human skin and replacing body fluids and fat with injected plastics. Bones, muscles, nerves, veins and organs— everything beneath the skin— are then revealed and visible. Body tissues eventually become so rigid they can be displayed in upright lifelike poses. A plastinated body is expected to last longer than an Egyptian mummy. Hmmm…

Drs Von Hagens and Whalley want London’s Body Worlds, their first permanent venture, to be an interactive, educational and ‘fun’ insight into how our bodies work and to promote healthy living. Locomotion—how we move— is represented by exposed musculature of three tennis players, the cardiovascular system by a tableful of cardplayers, reproduction by copulating corpses and an array of preserved foetuses in various stages of development. And so on, illustrating the nervous system, digestion, respiration and more via dozens of fascinating, extremely graphic displays.

Transparent Plastinated Body Slices at Body Worlds

Dr Von Hagens’ own life and back story are equally fascinating. Born in Poland and growing up in post war East Germany, he was inspired to follow a career in medicine when, aged 6, the family doctor diagnosed young Gunther’s haemophilia. On route to inventing plastination in 1977, he obtained a medical qualification, taught anatomy, married his student Dr Whalley and went to prison for attempting to escape to the West.

At the London preview the good doctor shook my hand and smiled broadly beneath his hallmark black fedora which he is famous for wearing whenever in public, even when performing anatomical dissections. This is apparently a reference to the hat worn in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt. Now terminally ill, Dr Von Hagens is busy working on plans to incorporate his own plastinated body into the show after he dies.