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Bbodies The Plastinator on the ethics and aesthetics of a travelling anatomy exhibition In 1997, in the space of four months, more than three-quarters of a million people—the highest attendance for any post-war exhibition in Germany and more than the famous annual Dokumenta art review in Kassel has ever attracted—queued to be admitted to Mannheim’s Regional Technical and Industrial Museum. The exhibition attracted similar attendance figures when it moved to Japan, reportedly receiving more than a million visitors, and to the traditional European capitals of death, Vienna and Basel, where I caught up with it. It is now showing in Cologne; here, too, it is drawing in the crowds. This is no ordinary exhibition, and not the display of fossilised machine tools from Germany’s long and unfinished history of industrial achievement that might have been expected from the museum’s name. What is on show, in fact, is a collection of 6  A Doctor’s Dictionary
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about two hundred human anatomical specimens including the usual kinds of body sections, slides of diseased and healthy tissues, organs in glass cases, and so forth. These are standard objects in an exhibition of this kind. More controversial, and certainly more spectacular, are the eighteen ‘plastinated’ cadavers—Ganzkörperpräparate, or whole-body preparations. Anatomy exhibitions have gone on the road before, though you might have to go a long way back, to the living human exhibits in the freak shows of the Victorian circus era, to find an exhibition which has aroused so much curiosity and controversy. Many of the anatomy museums in Europe’s famous medical schools are either accessible to the more intrepid kind of tourist or can be consulted by appointment: I spent a long afternoon a few years ago in the mote-filled hall of the University of Montpellier’s junk room, examining one of its famous series of wax impressions of syphilitic buboes and chancres from the nineteenth century. Montpellier’s anatomy tradition goes back to 1315, when the body would be opened for inspection by two barbers under the instruction of a magister reciting the appropriate Galenic text. It is a tradition that has been revived in several books by Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, a professor of pathology in the Children’s Memorial Hospital at Northwestern University who has created a literary subgenre of his own: portrayals of the unusual and the monstrous drawn from his professional life and given a savant veneer that places them somewhere between Jorge Luis Borges and Sir Thomas Browne. In one of his essays , ‘Bologna, the Learned’ (in the book Suspended Animation, 1995) he reminds us how popular public dissections were in the fourteenth century when they were advertised by being posted in Latin, the language of the dissections, on the columns of the Archiginnasio days before the event. Public dissections became routine only at the beginning of that century. Prisoners were condemned pro faciendo de eo notomia—to make an anatomy of them. The cutting, rending and division of a body was a chance for the demonstrators to show the ‘image of the universe’ to the audience, and for learned members of the audience to engage in heated disputatio; it was above all an event in the social calendar. Hogarth’s ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’ offers a very sarcastic visual commentary, in the disembowelment of poor hanged Tom Hero by a pack of doctors, on how the poor B | bodies  7

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Bbodies

The Plastinator on the ethics and aesthetics of a travelling anatomy exhibition

In 1997, in the space of four months, more than three-quarters of a million people—the highest attendance for any post-war exhibition in Germany and more than the famous annual Dokumenta art review in Kassel has ever attracted—queued to be admitted to Mannheim’s Regional Technical and Industrial Museum. The exhibition attracted similar attendance figures when it moved to Japan, reportedly receiving more than a million visitors, and to the traditional European capitals of death, Vienna and Basel, where I caught up with it. It is now showing in Cologne; here, too, it is drawing in the crowds. This is no ordinary exhibition, and not the display of fossilised machine tools from Germany’s long and unfinished history of industrial achievement that might have been expected from the museum’s name. What is on show, in fact, is a collection of

6  A Doctor’s Dictionary

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