This story has everything a great Bathroom Reader article should: death, a mad scientist, an eccentric celebrity, and polymerized semisolid body parts.
THE ANTI-FRANKENSTEIN
Some call what Professor Gunther von Hagens does with dead bodies ghoulish and degrading. Not helping his image is his trademark outfit—a pressed black suit and a black fedora (the kind of hat Freddy Krueger wears). But the 65-year-old German anatomist dismisses his critics: “In all human history, the human body was always exploited for disgusting feelings. I’m doing the opposite. I break with the tradition of Frankenstein.”
Von Hagens is the founder of Body Worlds, a touring exhibition that has attracted more than 29 million visitors since 1995. The show utilizes plastination—a process von Hagens invented and patented in the late 1970s—that preserves dead bodies and organs for display and study. The process combines his two favorite childhood activities: building model airplanes and learning anatomy from the doctors at a hospital where he spent a lot of time because he was a hemophiliac.
Plastination involves removing the liquid (water and fats) from a corpse and replacing it with reactive polymers (plastics) so that the body will become semisolid and won’t decay. Once completed, the mostly skinless figures (with muscles, organs, and bones showing) are set in various poses. A typical Body Worlds exhibit may feature skinned cadavers sitting around a table playing poker (one is handing another a card with his foot in a parody of the Dogs Playing Poker painting). Or you may see an anatomically correct couple performing a gymnastics routine, or a corpse riding a skateboard, or a plastinated rider on a plastinated horse. “Plastinates show the beauty of our body interior,” says von Hagens.
“It’s pornography of the dead human body,” says Catholic philosopher Thomas Hibbs of Baylor University. “The problem with death in our culture is not that we have taboos about it, but that we lack a rich language for articulating the experience and its meaning. It’s hard to see how Body Worlds will help solve that problem.”
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Dr. Hibbs is one of many theologians offended by von Hagens’s works. Britain’s Bishop of Manchester has repeatedly referred to von Hagens as a “body snatcher” and claims that the donation of bodies for plastination has resulted in fewer organs being donated for transplant. Ethics questions have dogged Body Worlds from the beginning, including accusations that von Hagens steals his cadavers from prisons and insane asylums in China and former Soviet countries. Von Hagens responds: “What I certainly never use for public exhibitions are unclaimed bodies, prisoners, bodies from mental institutions, and executed prisoners.” All of his cadavers, he says, are from willing North American and European donors (a claim that was verified by a California ethics commission investigation in 2004).
Von Hagens revels in the controversy. He agrees that people don’t really know how to discuss death, and his aim is to take the awkwardness out of it. For example, in 2002 the professor performed the first public autopsy in the U.K. in 170 years. Despite being threatened with arrest, von Hagens went ahead with the gruesome show. Police, along with 500 spectators, jammed into a London theater to watch him cut into a recently deceased 72-year-old man. Audience members gasped as von Hagens sawed through the cadaver’s skull with a hacksaw and then again when he reached into the body’s torso and pulled out handfuls of organs, declaring, “I have liberated the lungs and heart!” Though the smell was reported to have offended some viewers, the autopsy went off without a hitch, and von Hagens managed to avoid arrest. He was eventually exonerated of any crime, and the autopsy “show” was later broadcast on Channel Four Television.
Riding high on his fame, von Hagens once offered to plastinate Pope John Paul II, who died shortly afterward. The request was denied, but then von Hagens set his sights on an even bigger fish.
Someone claiming to be an associate of Michael Jackson contacted von Hagens in March 2009 and told him that the eccentric pop star was fascinated by his body-preserving technology. “He’s definitely up for undergoing the plastination procedure when the time comes,” the representative told him. So von Hagens scheduled a Body Worlds exhibit to coincide with Jackson’s summer 2009 shows in London and made this offer: “I could give Michael the gift of physical immortality—he has already achieved this with his music. As a plastinate, he could continue to have his body shaped and changed as he did when he was alive.”
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A few months later, of course, Jackson died amid a firestorm of scandal. Von Hagens acknowledged in a press release that the person who contacted him may not have been a spokesperson for the performer after all. “Without a signed body donation form by Michael Jackson himself or by all of his family members, I will not become active.” But then he made an impassioned plea: “I can offer the family of Michael Jackson a whole-body plastination free of charge. The pose would be a dancing one, to be determined by the family in detail.” There was no response from the Jacksons. Or was there?
Mystery still surrounds Michael Jackson’s interment at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. The funeral, which took place more than two months after Jackson’s death, was shrouded in secrecy and attended by only a few of his close friends and family in a “non-public” area of the cemetery. Forest Lawn officials have since offered this warning to would-be visitors: “Fans who believe they can find Jackson’s above-ground crypt in the expanses of the Great Mausoleum should rethink that,” noting the tight security including several surveillance cameras. All the secrecy is probably due to the family’s wish for privacy and their concern that a public gravesite would be mobbed by well-wishers or damaged by vandals.
But, some have theorized, maybe the King of Pop isn’t interred at Forest Lawn at all. Maybe he’s been plastinated in some laboratory to one day appear in the biggest Body Worlds exhibit of all.
But even if Jackson doesn’t show, there are another 9,000 living people lined up to be plastinated…including the good doctor himself.