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Exhibition Reviews
"Body Worlds 3." St. Louis Science Center, St. Louis, Mo. http://www.bodyworlds.com/en.html.
Temporary exhibition, Oct. 19, 2007–March 2, 2008. Gunther von Hagens and Angelina Whalley, exhibition creators.
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| Anatomy has always titillated and tormented society. From the Ptolemies, who offered permission to dissect and vivisect prisoners as a way of luring Hellenistic medical scholars to the "frontier" of second-century Alexandria, to the spectacle of Renaissance anatomical theaters to the body snatching of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the opprobrium attached to India's exporting of skeletons for use in anatomy teaching, many from graveyards, over the last two decades, opening up the human body to discover its secrets has provoked popular fascination and social revulsion (Scott Carney, "Inside India's Underground Trade in Human Remains," Wired, Nov. 27, 2007, http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/15-12/ff_bones?currentPage=2). |
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Still, it may seem peculiar to review "Body Worlds 3" (BW3) for the Journal of American History. The subject of the exhibition is not explicitly the historical, but rather the biologically present. As one visitor wrote in the exhibition's comments book, "[The exhibit] shows what I look like!" Unless one takes a paleoperspective on the nature of history, as the historian Daniel Lord Smail has recently argued we should, this exhibit seems to offer science education, not the longue durée (On Deep History and the Brain, 2007). |
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However, BW3 stands in a long tradition of American fascination with the publicly "outed" body. From open-casket funerals to public executions, from lynchings to displays of bodies and body parts as war trophies, from freak shows to wax museums, the American body public has been curious about its public body. Indeed, a little over a hundred years ago, in the same park that now contains the St. Louis Science Center, the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition displayed newborn babies in incubators (admission: $.25 for adults, $.15 for children). Moreover, like the plastic-inseminated body parts making up the bulk of BW3, the happening itself was infused with history. Cloth-backed hangings of Renaissance anatomical engravings adorned most of the walls. Quotations from writers stretching from Augustine to Immanuel Kant and beyond oversaw the observing public as Virgils to our Dante. Historic artistic representations, such as Rembrandt's vision of Dr. Tulp conducting an anatomy lesson (1632), helped beguile the squeamish. But most important, the entire enterprise is permeated by the originator's view of his own place in history, a point to which we shall return. |
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Gunther von Hagens, a German physician-anatomist, invented and patented the process of plastination that allowed this exhibit to take place. In 1977 he was teaching anatomy at the University of Heidelberg and sought to improve anatomical demonstration. He imagined replacing the fluid in the body's cells with plastic. In an Edisonian sequence of trials he generated a system using resins and curative gases. To help diffuse his technique, von Hagens founded the private Institute for Plastination with more than four hundred licensees around the globe. For this "discovery," he called himself "one of the leading anatomists of our time," who "joins the pantheon of great anatomists" (Gunther von Hagens, Gunther von Hagens: Inventor of Plastination and Creator of the Body Worlds Exhibits, n.d.). Not only a technological avatar but also a democratizer of knowledge, the former East German political prisoner sought to compel viewers of the exhibition to interpret him as the Promethean who liberated anatomical knowledge from the clutches of the unjustly godlike physician-scientists, bestowing it on laypeople around the globe. "Knowledge about the human body," he has written, "should not remain the secret of a privileged few, it should be freely available to everyone. Nothing is as close to us as our body, but there is nothing else that is close to us and about which we know so little" (ibid.). History and the (re)writing of history were thus very much a part of this exhibition. |
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