Bodies: The Exhibition

September 27, 2008

Today I braved the rain and severe humidity to go over to Fulton Street Market in the City to see "Bodies: The Exhibition." It is absolutely amazing.

If you haven't seen this show and it comes to your town, I highly recommend it. Currently, in the U.S., it's showing in Vegas, NYC, Indianapolis, and Honolulu. This exhibit contains displays of real human cadavers, dissected in numerous ways to show the inner workings of the human body.

The bodies come from a medical university in China. It is truly facinating how people managed to remove, for example, all of the tissue surrounding the entire circulatory system and preserve that incredibly complex mesh of veins and arteries in its original form. How on earth did they do that? In another part of the show, the entire central nervous system is laid out on a table.

Very impressive. When I inquired the amount of time it would take to do such work, I found out that the show was 10 years in the making.

There were several organ samples showing various diseases (cancer, Parkinson's, etc.), and some cross-sections of the brain of a stroke victim. I couldn't believe how black the smoker's lungs were. Nearby was a huge, enclosed clear acrylic container full of partially used cigarette packs. There was a slot cut out in the top for patrons to toss their cigarettes after seeing the condition of those lungs.

I saw an aneurism, a peptic ulcer, hardened arteries, gallstones, cancer of the larynx, skin melanoma, advanced breast cancer, lung cancer, diverticulosis, intestinal polyps, an ovarian cyst, cirrhosis of the liver, a real pair of conjoined twin fetuses, an ectopic pregnancy, and much more. Nothing short of fascinating. I held a real human liver in my hand, along with a brain, a muscle, and a shin bone. Oh, and the the multiple vertical cross sections of an overweight woman was enough to make me (briefly) consider never eating again.

There's a video about the processes behind Bodies on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqKvYUO7C7w, which actually takes you to one of the Chinese "body factories" and describes the preservation process, called plastination. In this video you will see medical students dissecting cadavers and placing them in "playful" positions for the exhibit.

Apparently this is a big business in China. Another video takes you inside the actual exhibit, narrated by a forensic pathologist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kJmypE1DGQ.

That's it. Time for dinner!