Plastic, Fantastic

by Bruce Schimmel

LONDON -- A young father with two preteen girls in tow is gazing with obvious delight at the first item of "Body Worlds," this city's indisputably most popular exhibit.

"You see that," says the father pointing to some intestines, "those are where sausages come from."

Maybe if you're Hannibal Lecter. Because the intestines in question are human, hanging some 10 feet below an inverted corpse to whom those kishkas used to belong. The inverted figure looks like a pole vaulter about to clear the bar.

Located in an obscure art gallery in London's downscale East End, "Body Worlds" (www.bodyworlds.com) features 25 skinned corpses, in a variety of curious positions, along with a generous smorgasbord of organs, many diseased, all covered and impregnated with plastic.

Close to a million visitors have endured waits of an hour and a half -- in a part of town where Jack the Ripper used to ply his trade -- to behold these fantastic plastic figures. Tourists, pensioners, even schoolchildren by the busload have come to contemplate real corpses that have been turned into plastic and, some would argue, art.

Gunther von Hagens, a medical doctor and professor of anatomy born

n East Germany, invented the process of "plastinization" used for the exhibit. In plastinization, the flesh and fat of medical cadavers are dissolved in acetone, and the bones, nerves, muscles and organs completely saturated with plastic. The bodies are then modeled as if they were doing activities from everyday life.

For example, another athlete is shown dribbling a basketball, rushing downcourt. There's a woman suspended in air swimming, her muscles turning and taut. Some figures still have strips of flesh attached. Others are sectioned into flat slices. Many, like the pole-vaulter, look like exploded puppets, with their own parts dangling by wires in front of them.

But the show's clear tour de force is a plastinized man astride a plastinized horse. The man holds his brains in his right hand and the horse's somewhat smaller organ of thought in his left.

Von Hagens' stated mission in life is to bring anatomy to the people. Derided by some as a mere showman and pimp, he has been accused of chicanery and pornography by critics in both the medical and religious worlds.

Still, no one can dispute his show's success. Since the 1997 opening of "Body Worlds"in Germany, over nine million in Japan, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and now London have seen it. Over 5,000 of these attendees have reportedly volunteered to have their bodies plastinized after death.

"Body Worlds" closes in London Feb. 9 and will move to Munich. No plans have been announced for a U.S. tour.