In May, I posted on an exhibit currently in Durham called Bodies: The Exhibition. At the city’s newest mall, 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.
As I noted, 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.
I wrote what I thought would be a lonely letter to our local newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer. But luckily, another outraged person, Sarah Redpath, also protested what was a clear insult to human dignity. Now, Redpath has created a fantastic web site for a new organization, No bodies 4 profit. Online, you can sign a petition that calls for legislation banning the use of bodies without consent for commercial purposes. Amazingly, Redpath has also met with a leading educator in North Carolina who agrees that field trips to this sideshow are not educational — piercing a key claim of the hucksters behind this travesty.
Help Redpath out by signing this petition and writing your state and federal officials urging them to support a ban on this type of for-profit exhibit. Human rights thrives from the actions of individuals like Redpath, who see an injustice and choose to do something about it. Adelante, Sarah!!!!
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My hats off to you and to Sarah for publicly opposing this exhibit. It is wrong even if it is not for profit, and even if there is “permission” to use the bodies. No one can give you permission to do something wrong. The touted educational benefits can be achieved by other means. The bodies are being used to attract attention and sell tickets. There is a lot of PR about these exhibits, with a lot of money at stake. Much of it is designed to ease our consciouses and make us comfortable with being voyeurs. This exhibit deprives us of our dignity, and makes our bodies mere commodities, and lowers are respect for the living as well as for the deceased. The claim is that it is for science and education. This does not make it so. See the site I created at http://dignityinboston.googlepages.com/durham
for more information.
Aaron Gnsburg Sharon, MA