Body Worlds: Love It, Hate It, Creeped Out?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’ve seen one of them, but I can’t remember if it was Body World or Bodies, the Experience.

First five minutes in, I was jaw-agape stunned. The next five minutes, I started to get grossed out. Then, I recovered my equilibrium and spent the rest of the time being amazed and filled with wonder.

A human kidney can fit inside the hollow of your palm! I never knew. I always that it was the size of a phone handset. The brain and the heart were also much smaller than I expected.

There was an exquisitely dissected set of female genitalia - the vulva, the clitorus, and the vagina. The uterus and ovaries were tiny. The uterus by itself could fit into the palm of your hand.

The fetal development display brought me closer to advocating pro-life sentiments than I have ever felt. So tiny and so human.

There were quite a few examples of disease in the human body, especially the disease we bring onto ourselves. The comparison of smoker’s lungs to nonsmoker’s was shocking. Smoking doesn’t just damage the lungs, it destroys them.

And obesity? I am an overweight woman (down from a BMI of 41 to 34.7 in the last year, but still), seeing the cadavers that were rated only “obese” shut down all my arguments and finally brought home to me that I had to do whatever it took to get the weight off. It wasn’t about arbitrary standards of beauty. It wasn’t about judging my value as a human being. It was about the toll that extra weight took on all the parts of my body. If I could look at a plastinated corpse of a fat man and feel such pity and horror for him, I had damn well take a second look at myself.

I wish there were a way for every city to have a permanent exhibit of that sort. I read that the artist has far more people willing to donate their corpses than he has capacity to deal with. So long as the bodies are donated by people with their informed consent and the exhibits are as high quality as what I saw, I would encourage everyone to see it.

22

Saw Body Worlds and thought it was one of the most wonderful, amazing, eye-opening and informative things I’d ever seen.

23

Saw it in Chicago. Thought it was amazing.

24

I saw Body Worlds in Los Angeles several years ago. I was sure I would like it and I did; it remains one of my favorite exhibits of all time. What I didn’t expect was the sheer artistry on display, both in an aesthectic sense and from a technical standpoint. There were people (the term “corpses” seems wrong here) posed on one foot or even on their toes, with almost no supporting hardware visible.

Many times while gazing at a body, after circling around it and bobbing up and down to get a view of everything, I’d find myself touching my own body - cupping my elbow, feeling along my jawline, etc. - and thinking, “Oh, that’s how that works.” Textbook illustrations never elicited that kind of visceral (heh) response from me.

25

This was my reaction too - until I was taking a close up look at one of the exhibits, and saw that it had nasal hairs. That jerked me back into reality, that these were actual people’s actual bodies I was looking at!! It was a fascinating exhibit all around, and if it ever came to Cape Town, I’d go again.

26

I bought the exhibit’s wonderful catalog when I left, to give others at least some idea of what it all looks like.

The skin of the subjects in my exhibition was painted gold, I guess to make it less scary.