Bodyworlds and Meat

Bodyworlds and Meat

Walking through Midway Airport to catch a flight back to KC, I noticed a large ad for the Bodyworlds 2 exhibit, directing passersby behind a lengthy black curtain.

The curtain has always puzzled me. I suppose I can understand intellectually how someone might have an ethical objection to the exhibit, but its hard for me to empathize with.

I wanted to take the kids to the first one; my wife would have none of that. I defer. I didn’t end up going, though I find the idea fascinating.

So I was keen to have a look behind the curtain, however brief.

What lay behind the curtain was a series of cross-sections of the human body standing upright, each 2-3 millimeters thick, spaced maybe 10 centimeters apart, laid out on a table, like a cadaver in a morgue, in the shape of a whole body.

And despite a recent enjoyable repast at the bar of Brasserie Jo, I couldn’t help but think, when looking at a particularly well-marbled cross-section of the upper thigh, that looks like a pretty nice cut of meat.

My wife has the opposite problem.

Being a pathologist and working with human parts and knives on a daily basis, she will occasionally come upon a dish in a restaurant that's a little too close to work for her to enjoy.

And beef jerky? Forget about it.

Aaron Deacon wrote:Bodyworlds and Meat
Walking through Midway Airport to catch a flight back to KC, I noticed a large ad for the Bodyworlds 2 exhibit, directing passersby behind a lengthy black curtain.

It is back?

I was SO glad to see that exhibit leave last summer.

It's like when I got the cold, horizontal slices of beef shank at the Westmont food court. Anyway up for a plate of CAT scan?

"Von Hagens has been repeatedly accused of using bodies from deceased persons who did not give consent, such as prison inmates and hospital patients from Kyrgyzstan and executed prisoners from China. He maintains that all bodies exhibited in Body Worlds came from donors who gave informed consent. A commission set up by the California Science Center in Los Angeles in 2004 confirmed Von Hagens' claims. However, Von Hagens does not make the same claim for all bodies prepared by his plastination institute, only the ones exhibited in Body Worlds. There is also the issue that the children and unborn fetuses included in the exhibition had no way of giving informed consent to the display of their bodies; in the case of children informed consent would have to have been obtained from their parents."

From Wikipedia

As a health professional, I had free admission to this year's event, but could not stomach going to see it considering some of the bodies may come from prison inmates or executed prisoners. There was a YouTube video of an interview of Von Hagen also touring his warehouses/factories in China showcasing their "work" and the various Chinese medical school graduates who worked in dissecting bodies, plastinating and modeling the corpses. It was disturbing.

Articles re: ethics of cadaver exhibition by NPR and body trafficking.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=5637687