Body Worlds Review

It was easy to see how controversy has followed this exhibition. The first room you walked into was a step by step viewing of the beginnings of life. Embryos at varying degrees of growth. From as little as a few weeks old, it was fascinating to see how little they could be and still have fingers and toes. It gradually moved into the fetus section and then to a woman with a child still inside her (photo in last post). While marveling at the beauty of life, there was a point where I remembered that these were all dead little babies and that was a strange thing to go through your head while really celebrating life. Other parts of the exhibition were donated by the people themselves prior to death, but the baby section, obviously, was not.

For the most part it was easy to forget that the figures were once alive. They had a very surreal aspect to them that made it easy to just look at them as anatomical models. Then all of a sudden you would see eyelashes, or fingernails, or pubic hair and realize that they were in fact corpses. I highly recommend it for people who are in school for something anatomical. Being able to see the different systems and see that they work together was an amazing learning experience for D and my friend. For me, it was just nice to look inside a dead person without having to deal with the smell of a cadaver.

All three of us got a lot out of the exhibition. There was very little on the fat front. A cross section of a 250+ man was shown but the actual procedures needed can not be done on someone with fat still on their bodies because it relies on the removal of fat for preservation. In the description of the fat cross section there was a sentence that stated that highly obese women lose 8 years off their life. The next room over said that people who have a good sex life can gain 8 years on their life expectancy. So according to the researchers for the Body Worlds exhibition… I am golden.