Bodies Unworldly

Today we trundled out of Astoria off to Portland to see the Body Worlds 3 exhibition at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Bizarre doesn't begin to cover rooms full of flayed corpses posed in peculiar positions. The ballerina above was not in this particular exhibit.

With all the blathering about the "plastination" process throughout the exhibit, you tend to think it's all just plastic, as nothing looks like it was formerly flesh until you look closely. Several of the specimens seemed to be from elderly men, judging from the ear hair and white eyelashes, who now look young again minus their slipcovers.

Also throughout the exhibit are mentions of the 6,000 "volunteers" who donated their bodies to be plastinated, and not-to-subtle requests for more donors. All of which comes under the "yikes!" chapter in my book. Not to mention, even though the theory is that you will be preserved forever, I can't help but think that if I did it, I'd wind up in a dank broom closet somewhere when they find a new and better process. Not a happy thought.

The creator of this art(?), artifice(?) is Dr. Gunther von Hagens, a rather ghoulish-looking character who, in a film that projects on a back wall, wears a large black hat and blue scrubs while in the process of "plastinating" corpses. He's creepy enough to scare the bejesus out of children and small dogs, and a large poster of him grinning looms over the exhibit, giving the place a cheery death-camp ambiance.

Here's a little info from a website about the plastination process:

• Plastination, invented by Dr. Gunther von Hagens in 1977, is a vacuum process whereby the body’s water and fat are replaced with reactive plastics that are initially pliable and then harden when cured with light, heat or gas. All tissue structures are retained.
• Unlike plastic models, plastinated specimens are intricate, REAL displays of human anatomy.
• It takes an average of 1,500 hours to transform a cadaver into a full-body plastinate.
• Plastinated specimens are dry and odorless and retain their natural structure – in fact, they are identical to their pre-preservation state down to the microscopic level.
• "Slice plastination" is a special variation of this preservation technique. Frozen body specimens are cut into slices which are then plastinated. Plastinated organs and body slices are a useful teaching aid for cross-sectional anatomy which is gaining importance in medical communities.

There were many glass cases with plastinated organs and bones, and somehow that was a little easier to take than the displays where the organs were sitting primly in the body cavities or balanced on a hand.

A flattened and sliced obese man (like doing a cross-section of a tree) provided a strange specimen. The internal organs were all squished, and apparently he died of a heart attack.

The piece de resistance was a camel posed with a baby camel. It has quite the trompe d'oeil effect as you round a corner and boom! There it is.

Most people also seemed quite intrigued by the clean lungs next to the cancer-eaten lungs. Nearby was a looped video of Yul Brynner, who died of lung cancer more than 20 years ago, telling people not to smoke. Next to the screen with his image was a plastic box for people to throw their cigarettes in and "take the pledge."

All in all, a very fascinating exhibit, but I was disappointed that some of the figures I had read about or seen photos of were not on display. Even so, it was worth the trip.