A flayed man with his brain exposed sits contemplating a chessboard and an elderly spectator reaches out to suggest a move. Nearby, teenage boys respectfully gaze at a naked woman whose dissected belly holds a seven-month fetus. And a man split twice longitudinally sits astride a flayed horse-holding its brain in one hand, his own in the other. Is this a scene from the studio of notorious shark-pickling artist Damien Hurst? No, it鈥檚 the work of a professor of anatomy. Gunther von Hagens sees bringing people face to face with their own biology as an education in life-and liberating anatomy from the anatomists. Debora MacKenzie caught the show in Brussels before it headed for London.
I have to confess, I didn鈥檛 want to do this assignment. I felt really squeamish about looking at dead, dissected bodies. But now I鈥檝e changed my mind completely. I鈥檓 coming back, and bringing the kids.
Your first reaction is natural, because we see all our lives in the movies that death is supposed to be something gruesome. That鈥檚 because they always mix dying with decay. I freeze the body right after death, before decay begins. So the shock of my exhibition is that death is not gruesome, it is ordinary. We always have the problem that there are no visitors to our exhibitions when they first open, but then word gets out and the crowds start coming. We have had to stay an extra week in Brussels, and people have to wait two hours to get in. In Berlin we had 1.6 million visitors. It鈥檚 been that way everywhere so far.
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How did you get the idea for exhibiting dissected bodies in lifelike poses?
I invented the process of plastination in 1977, when I was an anatomy lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. The purpose was to create specimens for teaching and research. My company sells the polymers to medical schools and researchers in 40 countries, and I prepare specimens, especially for orthopaedic surgeons and pathologists in Germany and the US.
For example, we prepared specimens to study the blood vessels in the wrists of former jackhammer operators. This showed that holding the hammer in a certain position causes bone to disintegrate, because it restricts the flow of venous blood out of the tissue. Researchers also do histology, using thin sections of plastinated specimens to study the structure of the tissue.
But in Heidelberg I noticed that when I was showing specimens to medical students or first-aid groups, and there were both intact bodies and body parts, people always went towards the intact bodies. They saw themselves in the specimens, and gave them names. That gave me the idea for my first exhibition, in Japan. The only complaint we got was that the bodies were stiff, like dolls. So I went to Italy to study the great classical anatomists such as Vesalius, who always used lifelike positions.
Can people understand the parts of the body better when they see them in these poses?
Yes. I think anatomy lost its holistic aspects after the Renaissance, with the invention of the microscope and then cell and molecular biology. But when people see isolated parts of the body, they don鈥檛 see what was taken away. So I have developed a kind of exploded view, moving the body parts so that laypeople can put them back together in their minds. In that way they get a look inside the body without taking anything away from it.
What do other anatomists think?
There are three anatomy professors at Heidelberg. My old boss is completely supportive. Another was completely against what I do, and the third was caught in the middle. They sometimes didn鈥檛 speak to each other. Overall, the medical profession has mostly been favourable, but anatomists criticise me for showing the whole body instead of just parts. They claim it is too complicated for laypeople, they need models and pictures, not the real thing. But real is regarded as better in entertainment, sports and music, so why not anatomy?
The anatomists don鈥檛 want to lose their monopoly. And I think there is a kind of death denial in it: medical students are trained to regard death as unnatural. But I make it look natural. Here, death and life mix. The democratisation of anatomy also means, not just that laypeople can see what only experts are usually allowed to see, but participation. It means something very different when people make a positive decision in life to put their bodies on display as anatomical specimens, instead of unclaimed bodies just being taken.
And how do people participate?
At our shows in Germany people can pledge to donate their bodies after death, and we get on average a donation a day. But in 20 years in an anatomy department I never saw a teacher or student donate their body for dissection. Why? Because people can identify with whole specimens. People who see sections don鈥檛 donate. People who see bodies do. I have no shortage of bodies at all, and most of them are German.
How long do you have after death to get the bodies preserved?
In winter, they can last three weeks in the morgue. After I have injected them with formalin, I can start the plastination up to three years later. As long as there is no green discolouration, the body can be used for thin sections to examine fine structure. Even when it starts to smell it is still OK for silicone injections into the vessels, or for the ligaments.
My main research is into ways to improve the plastination process. First, I freeze the bodies. Then I replace the ice with acetone, then the acetone with polymer, then 鈥渃ure鈥� that. The acetone makes the tissue shrink, but with special polymer tricks I can counteract this with swelling during polymerisation so I have exactly the original volume. The hardness of the plastinated tissue is what allows me to pose the bodies, which previously was possible only for skeletons.
What do the churches think?
They have been divided. Some like it because they consider it evidence for the existence of God-who could have made the body better? Others don鈥檛 like it because they say the dignity of the people has been taken away. And it also takes away their monopoly over the body and death.
In Berlin they tried to ban the exhibition and held a requiem mass for the bodies. In Cologne, the churches asked people not to go, but two million came, even a group of nuns, early in the morning so no one would see them. On the other hand, in Oberhausen it was the head of the Catholic college who invited us to exhibit there. He gave out guides for Christian visitors. He had been to the exhibition and heard young women looking at the early embryos, and commenting on how developed they were, and how they could never have an abortion. Basically, I have friends and foes, but nothing in between.
Do you plan new exhibitions?
We started out paying for the first show from sales of the polymer. But we will barely break even with this show in Brussels, the costs are so enormous. With economies of scale, we should do better with two or three shows. We are opening soon in Korea. But the German exhibitions were profitable enough to allow me to invest $8 million in an industrial park in China where we will prepare specimens sent from Europe. I also have a position as visiting professor at the Dalian University of Technology in China, where we do research into improving the polymerisation process.
Is there room for improving your technique?
Yes. I am also working in Kyrgyzstan, at the State Medical Academy in Bishkek. In Western medical schools, almost no one does gross anatomy anymore, everyone is a physiologist or a biochemist. But in Kyrgyzstan they never had the money to do modern molecular biology-so the scientists there are still gross anatomists. I learn from them. I employ 30 biologists and doctors, and we are trying to improve the preparation of blood vessels. For instance, we grow special strains of bacteria to digest the unwanted tissue after we have injected the blood vessels with polymer. Then we use protozoan flagellates to eat the bacteria.
I like working in Bishkek. I grew up in East Germany, and spent two years in prison there after trying to defect, until I was freed along with other political prisoners in 1970. I speak fluent Russian and I know how these post-communist societies work. And I鈥檓 learning Chinese.
But is it art?
I have been called an artist, but I reject it. I give an aesthetic feeling to my exhibits-but in the way you would do in designing a book. Instruction is at the centre. That is why we have so many school groups coming to visit. You should never show a heart as an object of awe: you should show a heart as a heart, a brain as a brain. But I don鈥檛 dehumanise the specimens. The scandal is not me showing anatomy with a holistic view, the scandal is that others can cut up a body, put it in formalin where it loses its colour and shape, and try to pass that off to laypeople as a human body.
What people should really get out of this is a sort of consciousness of life. Looking at the healthy and diseased organs we show here, you get a feel for the importance of our bodies and a healthy life.
How does that happen?
Surveys in Germany have shown that 10 per cent of smokers who see the exhibit make long-term commitments to quit or cut down afterwards. We sell posters and T-shirts showing the lungs in the exhibition, from a smoker and a non-smoker. Those who report the most impact on their health after seeing the show are the ones who originally thought the show most controversial.
But by giving back the holistic aspect that anatomy lost over the past two centuries, we are also telling people in some way what they are. In part it is a memento mori, a reminder of the fact that we have only a certain time on Earth.
We are also part of nature amid a quite technical world. If I ask people, what nature is there in the city, they say, trees, dogs, cats. But they are part of nature, and they forget. Here, they see that.