by Samuel P Klaus

After Tokyo (Japan), Mannheim (Germany) and Vienna (Austria), Basle (Switzerland) was the site of an extraordinary exhibition, called "Körperwelten - Die Faszination des Echten" ("Worlds of the Body - the Fascination of the Real").  But what is it that drew more that half a million people to Vienna, almost a million to Mannheim, and over 2.5 million people to Tokyo? What kind of exhibition is it that leaves the visitors fascinated, delighted, but also stirs revulsive emotions in them, and evokes great disputes over ethical concerns?

At issue is the unprecedented public display of 200 real human anatomical specimens - whole cadavers as well as body parts - shown naked, ingeniously embalmed and, in many cases, sliced into a variety of cross-sections. The objects of the exhibition are the bodies of real people, of volunteer body donors, who have, after their death, been magnificently preserved through an embalming process newly developed by Günter von Hagens, a German physician and anatomy lecturer at the University of Heidelberg.

The first purpose of "Worlds of the Body", according to von Hagens, is to make people aware of both the beauty and the vulnerability of the human body, something with which von Hagens feels people have lost touch in today's high-tech society.

Preservation by Plastination

Decay is a vital process in nature but an impediment to morphological studies, teaching, and research. Plastination is a unique method of preserving tissue in a lifelike state. Plastinated specimens are dry, odorless, durable, last indefinitely, and can literally be grasped. They even retain their original surface relief and cellular identity down to the microscopic level.

Generally, the plastination process consists of four steps: fixation (for which any conventional method can be employed), dehydration, defatting, and plastination. After fixation, the specimen is put in up to three bathes of -25°C cold acetone for dehydration purposes. After dehydration it is put in acetone at room temperature for defatting.

Forced Impregnation is the central step of plastination: The specimen, soaked with the volatile solvent, is placed into a polymer solution. When vacuum is applied, the intermediary solvent is continuously extracted in its gaseous state. The evaporating acetone creates a volume deficit within the specimen drawing the polymer into the tissue as its replacement.

The preservation of thin body and organ slices (= Sheet Plastination) is more complex and requires significant investment in both equipment and auxiliaries. Organs are cut with a meat slicer, body specimens containing bone structure are cut with a band saw in 2-8 mm thick slices.

After impregnation the slices are cured between foils or glass plates or are casted with additional resin in a flat chamber composed of glass plates. Transparent body slices allow for detailed studies on anatomical and pathological structures in their topographical context.

Plastination was invented at Heidelberg University by Dr. med. Günter von Hagens back in 1978; ever since then, many applications have been derived from this unique process. Plastination is carried out in many institutions worldwide and has obtained great acceptance particularly because of the durability, and the high teaching value plastinated specimens have.

Günter von Hagens

Günter von Hagens, inventor of the plastination process, started studying medicines at the University of Jena in 1965. When he protested against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troupes in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and tried to escape from East Germany, he was arrested. After he was released in 1970, he could continue his studies at the University of Lübeck, where he graduated in 1973. He started working on developing the plastination process in 1977, founded in 1980 a company called BIODUR for the development and shipping of the machinery and auxiliaries for the plastination, and in 1993 he founded the Institute for Plastination.

The novelty of his work is due to the fact that it has never before been possible for a non-physician to take such a close look at the human body and its inner structure. By looking at a dead, plastinated body, one can truly catch a gasp of the miracle of life.

Another fact that contributes to the overwhelming interest in his work is the immanent confrontation with death, an important though, I must admit, closing part of our lives, which is neglected in our societies. Few of us have actually seen a dead body with their own eyes. And those who have, have done so mostly through a formalized event such as a funeral. Von Hagens exhibition allows us to overcome that taboo by literally being in contact with the dead.

To cite a comment of a body donor, now magnificently preserved for eternity: "Only through remembrance progress in thought is possible. Plastination has granted a new dimension to anatomical thought. To contribute to its progress will be an honour for me."

Art, Ethic & Morale

It is exactly the overcoming of such taboos that led to discussions on the grounds of ethical and moral reasoning. Should the dead human body be aestethiziced? Should it become merely a piece of art? Von Hagens never denied the artistic value of his work - the poses and atmospheres in which he plastinates the bodies are not merely due to the sole purpose of anatomical detail, but are a means of artistic expression as well.

Von Hagens not only preserves the bodies technically perfect, he also gives them aesthetic value, he adds a special sense of dignity to the mortal bodies of human beings through making them immortal specimens. Of course, this does not apply to the mere plastinated single organ, but to the whole-body specimens, the objects of the exhibition which attract most interest, especially from visitors from other than the medical field. What a performance artist is in the field of the living, a whole-body plastinate is in the field of the dead.

On one side, there's a morbid fascination when standing eye to eye to a plastinated body, looking at the exposed neural system or inner organs, knowing that I look just the same inside - and knowing that the cadaver in front of me used to be as alive as I am, just a couple of years ago.

And on another side, there's also a purely aesthetic fascination, a deep founded awe of the miracle of a human body. But this fascination about the aesthetic value of a preserved human body has led to heated discussions about the dignity of the dead human body - should it be possible to turn cadavers into works of art? A male body-donor, still alive, but willing to leave his body to science and art: "Michelangelo, Dürer, and Le Corbusier have all been active in the field of anatomical science. It is especially the application of plastination for the progress of art and culture that is fascinating."

Many people, especially those close to religious organizations, reject the idea of death becoming a spectacle. In their eyes, the dead body is sacrosanct, should not be publicly exposed, not even when the people explicitly state their wish during their lifetime. But then again, these are probably the people who, a couple of hundred years ago, answered the question about the miracle of life with a call for a stake and a torch.