Bodies: The Exhibition

“Bodies: The Exhibition” may reveal intricacies in the human form, but what it conceals is gruesome. Now at several cities in the US, including Durham, the show features “plastinated” bodies posed to show the workings of muscles, ligaments, bones and internal organs. “Plastination” preserves living tissue, and these are real human beings.

But the problems with the exhibit are numerous. Many of the bodies come from China, with its robust and largely unregulated market in human parts. Whether these people were executed prisoners, a possibility, or the poor, unclaimed at morgues, hardly matters. Premier Exhibitions, the host, cannot adequately show who they are or whether they gave permission to be put on display and turned into cash corpses.

Mass execution in China

Some reputable museums have declined to host the show, meaning that it has crawled to the Las Vegas strip and value-free zones such as the Streets at Southpoint, a Durham mall. The mall itself is a faux downtown, with fake tobacco warehouse-style buildings. Many Durhamites prefer the vast parking on offer along with the mall’s poverty-free attractions to our real downtown.

I guess that makes it a weirdly appropriate venue for such a reprehensible exhibit.

There are lots of ways, and better ones, to learn about the body. There are just too many ethical gaps. German physician Günther von Hagens developed the procedure he named “plastination,” which preserves living tissue. Plastination removes all fat and moisture from cadavers, replacing them with plastic polymers infused with bright colors to differentiate muscle groups, organs and blood vessels.

But his exhibitions, called “Body Worlds,” was controversial. The German newsweekly Der Spiegel claimed that some of the plastinated corpses showed evidence of bullet holes in the back of the neck, the preferred Chinese method of executing prisoners. Now, no venue in Europe will have him or a “plastinated” exhibit of this sort.

A competitor, Premier Exhibitions Inc., is using the same technique for the show currently touring the United States. According to the New York Times, Premier spent $25 million to obtain the corpses from a Chinese university. Premier’s president, Arnie Geller, told the newspaper that he was not allowed to keep copies of documents showing how Dalian University obtained the bodies, but he claims that he got them legally.

But human rights observers question that claim. From the New York Times:

Harry Wu, the executive director of the LaoGai Research Foundation, an organization that documents abuses in China’s penal system, said officials from Dalian University had been previously implicated in the use of executed prisoners for commercial purposes, having supplied bodies to Gunter von Hagens, the German entrepreneur who started the first traveling show of the dead, “World of Bodies.” Dr. Sui Hongjin, who was previously Mr. Von Hagen’s Chinese partner until a falling out three years ago, is now working with Premier Exhibitions, which has its headquarters in Atlanta. “Considering that China executes between 2,000 and 3,000 prisoners a year and their long history of freely using death row prisoners for medical purposes, you have to wonder,” Mr. Wu said, adding that he would pursue legal steps in this country to ensure that the show was not using illegally obtained bodies. “In China, a piece of paper means nothing.”

There is more. Von Hagen was in fact barred from plastinating corpses in Germany, because of uncomfortable associations with the Holocaust, so tried to establish a factory in Poland. He sent his father to set it up. But (whoops) turns out Dad had been in Poland once before, as an SS officer in 1940, and had been charged with compiling a list of 60 Poles to be sent to concentration camps.

Just imagine having Central Prison ship our executed inmates to Chinese plastination factories, eventually displayed in an Australian mall for $25 a pop. Or our homeless posed “playing basketball” in some Mexican strip mall or Thai casino. Is that all these human beings, “the poor,” were ultimately worth to us?

Even if Premier is telling the truth and these are “just” poor people, I object. Unclaimed bodies for medical research – fine with me. But for such a raw commercial venture and without consent. That’s not OK… Several communities have objected, and I wrote a letter to the Raleigh News and Observer calling on people to vote with their feet — boycott this macabre freak show.

Another letter writer was eloquent with her objection:

As I looked into the face of that man, stripped of his skin, my blood pressure dropped. The visceral horror was duplicated only by seeing photos of systematically dehumanized Nazi Holocaust victims. This is what we have become. This is acceptable. Why cry out about soldiers photographed with skulls of Afghan citizens when this abomination is education, art, normal? Hanging bodies beautifully on wires at the mall is a tiny step from lynchings or any other dehumanizing crime. Medical education pursues understanding of the human body with respect. Here, the deceit is the happy shopping context with simply more mannequins. This is not education. This is raw greed using cadavers as pawn. The exhibited people likely didn’t give their permission to be grotesquely violated for $24 tickets in a circus sideshow. What’s next in vogue — furniture from human bones?