Displaying corpses, resisting decadence

By Michael Medved

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To recognize what’s right with America, it sometimes helps to look at what’s wrong with the rotting civilization on the other side of the Atlantic. Unlike our cousins in Western Europe, most citizens of the United States maintain the ability to feel shocked, even outraged, at grotesque displays of degradation and decadence in the name of high culture.

Consider the new exhibition, “Body Worlds,” which opened at a prestigious London gallery on March 23. Arranged by Professor Gunther von Hagens, the show has already enjoyed a triumphant tour of Germany, Japan, Switzerland and Belgium. It features 25 actual corpses, along with 175 body parts, all neatly preserved by a patented process called “plastination” and artistically arranged by the professor. One skinned male body crouches over a chessboard, with his skull split open to reveal his brain. Another figure, “The Horseman,” holds a whip in one hand and his actual brain in the other, as he sits astride the cadaver of a leaping horse. Both man and beast have been totally flayed to reveal the underlying musculature.

As if this weren’t enough to thrill even the most jaded patrons of cutting-edge art, the climax of the exhibition offers the bisected corpse of a woman who was eight months pregnant, with her womb slit open to display her skinned fetus.

Explaining his ground-breaking and critically acclaimed work, Professor von Hagens told the Guardian newspaper: “I want to bring the life back to anatomy. I am making the dead lifeful again. This exhibition is a place where the dead and the living mix.” Promoted as “edutainment,” the gallery invites the participation of children and offers teaching materials – video, catalogue, posters and so forth – free of charge to schools.

Amazingly, the “Body Worlds” show has brought in more than $75 million for Professor von Hagens and his Institute of Plastination. He plans to use the money for further “research” and to build a permanent Museum of Man, filled with literally hundreds of preserved corpses and body parts. Various celebrities have toured the exhibit in its various venues and written grateful letters, including rock star Tina Turner, as well as tennis players Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi.

One of the few British voices raised in opposition to the show received ridicule in the mainstream press. When Teddy Taylor, a Tory member of Parliament, suggested that the exhibition would appeal only to “ghoulish groups in our society,” The Guardian derided him as “one of those ill-informed media ding-dongs.”

All of the corpses displayed by von Hagens have been donated, mostly by people who opted while still alive for an odd sort of immortality through plastination and public display. The professor now says he has a registry of 3,200 donors who want their bodies to go to his exhibitions or his ultimate museum, thereby saving the cost of a funeral and “advancing the cause of human knowledge.” Von Hagens, 57, has recently plastinated his “best friend” and wants his own corpse displayed in a similar way “so that my human body will continue to teach.”

If one accepts the conventional wisdom of contemporary secularism that a human being is nothing more than a collection of chemicals, no more sacred than a tree or a rock, what’s wrong with the professor’s logic? If our life is purely physical and totally temporary, why not entertain gawkers with your nude form after death? Surely, the cleverly arranged, mostly skinned bodies displayed by von Hagens feel neither pain nor embarrassment.

Fortunately, that logic hasn’t yet captured America. The public reacted with rage and horror to the disgusting story of the Georgia crematorium that carelessly discarded hundreds of bodies that it had promised to burn. The anger went beyond indignation over a breached business agreement: Americans instinctively understood that dead bodies might not feel or think, but still deserved respect as the physical remains of sacred human beings.

We’re constantly told that Europe offers a more sophisticated and enlightened culture than our own, and we’re supposed to feel guilty for our own provincialism. After all, most nations of the Old World (particularly France, of course) winked at the Bill Clinton sex scandals, and ridiculed the American traditionalists who refused to accept a bit of infidelity as a fact of life. By the same token, many Europeans consider it bizarre that our supposedly civilized country boasts a rate of weekly church attendance that is some four times the Continental norm (40 percent to 10 percent).

Indeed, many Americans remain uncertain of where they stand on the wrenching disputes of faith vs. doubt – religious obligation vs. secular license – that color so many issues in this society. Occasionally, a story that’s bizarre and polarizing can help to clear away that confusion. If you retain the tendency to react with disgust, or at least discomfort, to the prospect of displaying skinned corpses for fun and profit, then, like it or not, you’re on the side of sanity and sanctity.


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Michael Medved hosts a nationally syndicated daily radio show focusing on the intersection of politics and pop culture. He's the author of eight non-fiction books.

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