To the Bodies Exhibit w/ kiddo?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, daughter, who is nine, saw a commercial on TV for the Bodies Exhibition at our museum center. She is very excited about it and wants to go. I asked her why and her response was simply, “It’s COOOLLL!!!”

Ok. After explaining to her that the bodies were real human cadavers, not plastic as she had believed (well, they are plasticized human remains), she was not deterred and said she didn’t think it was gross. We then reviewed her immense dislike for the gruesome visuals of shows like CSI. “But you don’t like seeing bodies and injuries on TV, even though you know that’s not real. This is real.”

“At least there’s no blood,” she says.

So, having established that this might be an intriguing educational opportunity for her and she is probably old enough to handle the idea, I found there’s been some controversy over it. The idea that these cadavers were not donated to science (something I’ve always held in high regard) bothers me a little bit, but I’m leaning toward placing a higher value on the educational factor of the exhibit. I have always found science interesting and am looking forward to sharing my interest with her.

Then there was this:

Hmm…should it raise serious concerns? It’s easy to say that we certainly live in a voyeuristic society, but this doesn’t really feel (to me, at least) like exploitation of the individuals themselves. Of course, that means that, in a sense, this may desensitize us to the uniquely human component of identity. Who were they? What did they do? Is that really relevant in a study such as this?

I’m not sure it is, but as a parent, it’s something I’d like to explore a bit before I introduce my daughter to something few people (used to) have the privilege of experiencing up close.

I’d love to hear from people who’ve seen the exhibit, parents who took their kids, and especially medical professionals that have much more experience with the dichotomy presented in studying humans without (or maybe you do at some point) considering the individual identity of the subject.

2

My daughter was working in the Orlando Science Center when they got the Body exhibit, and we went to see it. Now, I’m a total wuss when it comes to watching medical shows on TV (my husband loves those trauma ER series, and I can’t take 'em) and I found the exhibit to be fascinating.

My daughter said there were tons of school groups that came to see it, but they often got out of control. When we were there, on a weekend, there were families and individuals going thru, and I was amazed at the reverence of most of the people there.

In my opinion, it’s a not-to-be-missed exhibit. Take your daughter, and experience the wonder of the human body. You won’t regret it.

3

I loved this exhibit, was floored by its enormity of scope and as a parent, let me tell you it provides a WONDERFUL teaching tool for the dangers of smoking. A great deal of these bodies were smokers in life and their lungs look like the bottom of a garbage can. It is absolutely disgusting. Just because their bodies were not donated to ‘science’ perse, doesn’t mean they don’t serve a purpose of learning. To see the systems of the body laid bare, to see every capillary and bone and tendon in its place is simply mind boggling. It helps to give an appreciation for the amazing work our bodies do.

There’s also a display of an overweight man, cut into sections as compared to a healthy body, which is stunning and sobering.

While it was here in Chicago, there was an exhibit in a separate room (with a warning) of embryos, fetuses and babies in every stage of pregnancy from six weeks to birth and the body of a pregnant woman who died in an accident with the child in the womb. Heartbreaking, for sure, but fascinating.

For some reason, seeing that eight week fetus gave me some sort of closure with my own miscarriage…don’t know why.

I say don’t miss it for anything.

4

I took my son to see the Body Worlds, which is similar to, but not run by the same people, as Bodies Exhibition, when he was about 12 or 13. He loved the first few rooms, and then tired out and got bored and found a bench to sit on for an hour or two. It’s a LONG exhibit, and people walk through very slowly (well, slowly at the start, and then they start zipping through and skipping stuff nearer to the exit). I wouldn’t expect a 9 year old to really absorb more than half of it in one day.

I don’t share the voyeuristic concerns of the pundits mostly because I don’t hold the body either as something terribly sacred or shameful. Once the person’s dead, it’s all so much raw meat to me, and I’m fascinated with anatomy and physiology. I don’t see a qualitative difference between a dead human body and a dead chicken one - and she sees that in the supermarket every week, I bet. But I know I’m not in the majority with my irreverence for dead bodies*, so of course that’s something you’ll have to decide with her. It’d certainly be an interesting discussion.

I found BodyWorlds to be high on the science and low on the voyeurism, anyhow. There was very little detail about the previous owners of the bodies - at most a country of origin and maybe one or two professions. Most exhibits, but not all, identified the bodies as male or female. There are also lots of organs and bits and pieces in cases - I suppose one could say that they are “stripped of any larger human significance,” but I can’t really get myself worked up over an artificial hip joint under glass. But, again, that’s BodyWorlds. I haven’t seen Bodies Exhibition.

I’d be inclined to take her, but be prepared to not see the whole thing, if it’s as big as BodyWorlds. If she does have questions or concerns, then it’s time to answer them, of course. But I bet she’ll think it’s a whole lot like a really detailed model.

*Frankly, I think a whole lot LESS hiding of death would be useful in our culture - real death, that is, not simulated death. I know people my age (33) who have never held a dying person’s hand, and that’s just sad.

5

Oh wait, this isn’t Bodyworlds? I didn’t know there was a competing exhibit. I can’t speak to the Bodies Exhibition, but, you know, uh…Bodyworlds is great :smiley:

6

We took my son there for his tenth birthday. He dotes on the gory and gruesome, but found the exhibition to be…well, overwhelming. The first few displays fascinated him, but then it suddenly dawned on him that these were real people, and not just models.

He had to hide out in the bathroom for a bit to regain his composure.
We flew through the rest of the rooms, which was very disappointing (I found everything really informative, but didn’t have a chance to get a good look at anything). Given the high ticket prices, I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to see more.

fatgail , I found the fetus section to be very disturbing. I’m sorry for your loss - I’ve unfortunately had a few mc’s myself.

-Wallet-

7

I found it fascinating! I also would second the comment about smoking; seeing all of the “smoker’s lungs” is quite a deterrent. And the fetus room was amazing, although potentially controversial, depending on your personal views.

Be aware that the genitals are a noticeable part of the bodies (and the exhibit I saw showing penis cancer was the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen), so if you are uncomfortable with the obvious display of male and female reproductive organs (not graphic, mind you, but certainly apparent), you might want to hesitate going. Or at least be prepared for your daughter to point and ask.

8

Thanks for your replies. I figure I will take her if only because she so intrigued about it (yay!). She’s an extremely introspective and creative child, though, so I expect a lot of questions and I expect some of them to be quite…um, philosophical? I expect she will most definitely identify these cadavers with a thinking, feeling person and wonder aloud whether they knew they were sick, if they were happy, and where are they now. It’s a quite a feat to not stare at her dumbfounded at times.

So, these are all things I’m prepping myself for. I do anticipate this visit opening up whole fields for discussion, some having to do with anatomy and a lot more of the “big picture” kind of stuff. Like I said, she has a very creative, expansive mind. That said, I try to be open about my own views and tempering them with the caveat that hers may differ.

And I do expect a lecture about the diseases area, because I have to admit, I’m a smoker who is well aware of the physiological damage I’m causing myself. It’s really hard to even attempt to justify poor choices, but kids seem to require that. That part I’m dreading. (That being said, I respectfully request that concerned readers try to refrain from the lecturing I’ve heard oh-so-many times before.)

To any medical peeps out there wanting to chime in, I’m eager to read your perspectives.

9

I saw The Amazing Human Body Exhibition in Melbourne. On the day I attended there were two school groups there. One group was high school kids about 17 or so, the other was kids from primary school probably 10 or 11.

I personally found the exhibit a bit wearisome after a while, although as a former nurse I guess a lot of it wasn’t all that revelatory, and I just skimmed some of it. What absolutely amazed me though was what cheapskates the owners are. They must be making an absolute fortune yet the exhibits are accompanied by el cheapo laminated signs that look far the worse for wear. The whole layout of the thing is chintzy and unimaginative and the posed figures largely look ludicrous.

This person was the best sight of the whole exhibition.

As to the controversy about its “freak show” nature I attended with a friend who is an artist. We had discussed the controversy beforehand and he said to me, “It’s just an art exhibition, who are we to judge the artists intentions without seeing the work.” I replied that the guy who created the exhibition isn’t an artist and my friend replied, “You say he isn’t an artist but, although he is using a weird medium, he is trying to say “something” using a made object. How is that not art?”

10

I know what you mean. Death is such a hard thing to teach kids. The finality of it is so very difficult for children (and most adults) to accept easily. I think it’s because tend to personalize it. I’ve watched my grandfather waste away with bone cancer, saw my grandmother in her delirious moments days before her death, and held the hand of my other grandmother for hours the night she died. I was very emotional, slightly intrigued by certain symptoms of dying, and quite a bit uncomfortable with it. Because they weren’t just meat, they were loved ones. I can’t imagine being in the physical presence of traumatic death as I don’t think I’d handle that all that well even if I didn’t know the person.

So, based on that, I think I tend to shield my kids to a certain extent from those experiences, realizing that at some point, they’ll go through it themselves. Although, we have talked about dying and the cycle of life and all that, strictly from science and nature standpoint, and separately from the point-of-view of spiritual faith. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking it’s not an easy subject for a parent, though.

11

Interestingly, I’m not real worried about that. Parts is parts is parts to me. I’m not uncomfortable with her seeing sexual organs, although I expect she’ll find that aspect (at least) gross because she’s nine and female. She probably won’t even say anything about it because I think she’ll be embarrassed more than anything. There’s nothing sexually explicit about a penis, in my book. Now, if it had jewelry or recreational tools on it, I might take exception to exposing my 9yo to that. :wink:

12

I saw it in Vegas. I’m not particularly squeamish about anything, but the other people attending didn’t seem anything but fascinated.

There was one family with a handful of pre-adolescent age girls, who got a teeny bit giggly in the section on reproduction when they realized “OMG!That’s a penis!” Mom dealt with it calmly, and the girls quickly regained their interest in the non-penis parts of the exhibit. I didn’t notice how they reacted to the embryo & fetus displays, so I assume it either wasn’t traumatic or Mom subtly avoided those.

Do be aware that the Bodies are nekkid bodies, and that there are displays of the stages of fetal development. The Tropicana had that (reproduction) area marked with polite warnings and a way to bypass the area.

Other than that, it’s entirely educational, non-emotional and actually rather clinical. Not at all “gross” or provocative, but rather incredibly detailed to the point of seeming almost not real. Their eyelashes are intact, and bleached. That removed quite a bit of the almost-not-real feeling for me, but wasn’t gross or creepy.

The non-voluntary part is addressed, politely. I would rather they had been voluntary participants, but it was still fascinating. And amazing. And incredible. And very cool.

13

I hope you don’t take this as lecturing. It’s just that the method I used to give up was from a very old book* How To Stop Smoking, and Stay Stopped* by Gillian Riley. It was such a different method that it ended up being fun quitting. I just happened to notice while Christmas shopping that it is now available as an audio book which strikes me as the perfect medium for such a thing. Although according to the link it’s not out in the US yet.

Cheers.

14

My favorite part of the body worlds exhibit was at the end, there was a huge notebook where people could leave comments. Some were hateful, some were touching, some were funny, and my favorite, written in the angry block lettering of an 8 year old boy:

** WAY TOO MANY WIENERS ** signed, scott.

15

Bodyworld’s was touring in Toronto at the Science Center and there were many, many families there. As Fatgail mentioned the slice of the obese man was both fascinating and profoundly sobering (you could see how his organs were shifted out of position even, and half his heart’s metal pacemaker was still in place), it really drives home the toll that the obeisty problem represents.

I can’t speak of competing exhibits, but Bodyworld’s has a strong human kinetics focus for the anatomical displays. Certainly there are some stunning visual effects for the sake of effects, but they also have most of the bodies positioned so that you see the muscle groups being used specifically for the movement depicted. Eg/ the musculature of the back as you read a book (don’t slouch) and the back and abdomen muslces in a pirouetting figure skater (static in the exhibit of course).

It was utterly fascinating to see how various structures of the human body worked in concert and you really appreciate the “mechanical engineering” of the human body.

As for the “larger human significance”, I personally found some poignancy in the fact that frequently there was no obvious way to determine the race or age of the figures. It’s hard to describe… There was sort of sense of amazemenet and wonder of seeing the human form stripped down to it’s constructive elements and taken out of any specific social context, and you think: “Wow, this is us.” (Or atleat that was what was going through my mind for part of it.)

It’s the kind of thing that made me think of Hamlet: “What a piece of work is man!”

16

Because you care…

17

From what I saw on the news this exhibit could have been done with more detail if real people weren’t used. The process didn’t appear to be uniformly exact. Some exhibits were informative and some looked kinda ratty. Maybe it was the modeler who screwed it up. I suspect it would not be monetarily successful to drag an anatomy exhibit around without real cadavers. If that is the case then this is something of a freak show.

Maybe there are some parent/child Kodak moments to be had. Hard to say.

18

I saw BODIES: The Exhibition in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Science Center. It was an absolutely fascinating thing to see, and it took well over 3 hours to go through the entire thing. I’ve seen everything from plastic models of non-human origin (like the kind that get made for health classes) to the actual cadaver dissection at the U Pitt medical school, and to be honest, a plastic model cannot compete with a plasticized cadaver.

Every fake out there is just a little too perfect. There are no flaws, no abnormalities, no variations, no sense of whether or not that artistic representation is actually what it looks like inside a real human. To see the actual parts (and the first time I saw them for real was cadavers at 17) gives a sense not only of how amazing they are in form and function, but how incredible it is that surgeons can do their work. How they can tell what is say, a benign fatty deposit and what is a malignant tumor when looking at a kidney.

I don’t know that a 9 year-old kid is going to get all that nuance, but I also can’t say that it’s a worthless experience for them. I saw kids in there from probably 7 or so and people up to 70something. Bear in mind that the kids had a lot of questions, and a lot of those because the cadavers are all naked and in all of the full body dissections in BODIES, the genitals are also there in various levels of dissection.

The fetal development area may be too much for a kid, particularly because (at the Pittsburgh one) they had some rather late term fetuses that had abnormalities like spina bifida. It’s quite a learning experience, for all ages, and regardless of the fact that this is for the average person and not medical students, it did not in any way seem voyeuristic, no more so than the cadaver lab in Scaife Hall did. If you think your kid can handle the reality of seeing actual dead people dissected, then see it. No drawing in a book compares to seeing a real pituitary gland right in front of you.

19

I can’t speak for the knock-offs, but the Body World’s exhibit did not look ratty at all. Gunther von Hagens invented the plastination technique in the 1970s, so by now, he’s really got the kinks ironed out. You could tell which plastinates were older because they lacked… um… finesse, but they certainly weren’t ratty.

Any oddities were from bodies that were actually impefect themselves (one actually had an extra vestigal toe!) The imperfections were actually quite interesting. A nurse friend of me once told mine that anatomy books are idealized versions, in real life, often things aren’t quite where they should be. The aforementioned obese man whose organs had been displaced by all his visceral fat is a good example of that.

Note: I just realized that I saw Body Worlds II, not the first one.

Also, von Hagens’s plastinates were all willing donors who gave informed consent. A commission set up in the U.S. verified this about four years ago. I don’t know about other exhibits.

From what I understand Body Worlds I has a few more “artistic” plastinates that people object to because it deviates too much from the clinical science aspect and some people find the artistic license to be exploitive.

The exhibit I saw was certainly quite a bit more clinical, except the guy who was segemented in a way that can only be describe as “drawers”. Neat effect, it was really cool looking, but it was a little too irreverent and I would have been more comfortable if that had been a sculpture not a real person. But he was a hefty kind of guy, so on the other hand, you got to see how the fatty tissue was distributed throughout his body and how irregular a human body can be.

Photography was forbidden at the Body World’s exhibit and the ushers were quick to make you put your cellphone away in case there was a camera.

Oh, and a favourite part of mine is that they had the circulatory system of a chicken completely free standing. That was cool and probably wold have been really hard to recreate with as much detail an accuracy than the real thing.

Note: The chicken did not consent to the plastination.

20

I saw whichever one was at the Chicago Museum a few years ago.

It was riveting. Moving. I’ll second almost everything said here.

You know your daughter best. If you realize she will have a million questions and you will have a lot of conversations about it, I think you’ll be fine and it will be good experience.

When we were going in, there was a Mom walking out with a boy in the 9-11 range who was very upset. And she was telling him “okay, let’s come outside and talk.” And comforting him.

I cried a bit myself and was amazed (as others have posted) at seeing what goes on inside.

But it is FASCINATING.

When it came to Houston, I recommended it to everyone.