Skip to main content
Read page text
page 22
In the dissection groups of six to a table that were a feature of my days in the anatomy department of Glasgow University, imagination was stilled by the unpleasantness of the task and the pedagogic imperative: learn, learn, learn. Rote learning is drudgery: even surgeons don’t need to know all the sulci, tuberosities and foramina of every bone, nor every pulley and conduit of the softer parts as detailed by Alexander Monro in his The Anatomy of the Humane Bones (1726). What isn’t clinically important tends to be forgotten. Cynicism beckons, or you come to grief. My own enduring memory of the anatomy class is its smell, the pungent odour of formalin; it penetrated clothes and gloves, and lingered in the hair, a kind of olfactory ectoplasm from a cold place in which people no longer mattered. Enter Professor Doktor Günther von Hagens (the ‘von’ is an affectation), who describes himself as ‘inventor, anatomist, physician and synthetic chemist’. In the mid 1970s, at the University of Heidelberg, he developed—and patented—a new technique for preserving biological tissue called plastination. It had taken him fifteen years of experimentation with industrial solvents. Plastination is now used by medical schools across the world for the teaching of gross anatomy. It requires tissues, or whole bodies, to be fixed in the standard way with formaldehyde or some other preservative. Specimens are then dehydrated, a process in which the fluid in the tissues is replaced with a chilled organic solvent such as acetone. The next, and central, step of the process is forced impregnation: the solvent is replaced under vacuum with a polymer, silicone or epoxy resin, producing an object which can then be manipulated in ways that were quite impossible with previous preservation techniques. The final stage involves hardening of the polymer. Tissues can be rendered pliable or hard, and with a high degree of realism. The essential organic architecture of the body is preserved, although it is now about eighty percent plastic. In all, the process takes 500–1000 working hours. It is undoubtedly an elegant technique, and produces specimens which are much more resistant to oxidation and decay than the old formalin-phenol injected bodies. Plastination can give a body 500 years of postmortem standing. 10  A Doctor’s Dictionary
page 23
This technique, for instance, allows the skeleton to be guddled out, leaving the rest of the body, once the muscles have stiffened after absorbing the polymer, as a self-supporting ‘shell’. Hagens has exploited this feature in one of his dissections on show at the Mannheim museum, where the menacing musculature of the Muscleman is displayed a step ahead of his skeleton. The skeleton has been ‘shucked’ of its muscles, which have been left to stand free, their bloatedness no doubt resulting from the sheer difficulty of extricating the cranium, rib cage and long bones—of outing the inner man. It is a virtuoso piece of dissection work, but the raised left arm and flailing triceps conjure up a film image: Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. Several other of the whole-body preparations in the exhibition are similarly ‘exploded’ to show the relationships between the internal organs, or the arterial system. Nearby, the Orthopaedic Body is decorated with twelve different prosthetic devices, and sponsored by Johnson & Johnson. Another preparation suggests that the association between the Muscleman and Frankenstein was not fanciful: a standing figure has been defrocked of his skin which he holds in his right hand, all of a piece, with an imploring gesture. It is a direct ‘quote’ of the famous flayed man published by the Spanish anatomist Juan Valverde in Rome, in 1560. Yet other dissections have ‘windows’ cut into the bodies at various levels indicating important internal landmarks which have to be located or avoided during surgery. One of them is a young woman with a 5-month old foetus in her uterus, the overlying rectus abdominis muscle opened in the midline to reveal the dome of the uterus pressing upwards on the intestines. Another figure, posed like a chess-player, has been pared to the ribs to show the central and peripheral nerves as they exit in pairs from the spinal column and innervate the skeletal muscles, a feat of dissection beyond the means of the traditional anatomist. The organs of a ‘longitudinally expanded’ preparation, which has been made to squat, shoot upwards out of the body, and are held in space by threads. ‘I create space for the viewer to see the parts clearly’, says Hagans, ‘so that he can close the space up in his imagination.’ One preparation is dissected in bands and partitions, like Dali’s famous painting ‘Woman with Drawers’; another is caught in the act of B | bodies  11

Page Text

View plaintext

In the dissection groups of six to a table that were a feature of my days in the anatomy department of Glasgow University, imagination was stilled by the unpleasantness of the task and the pedagogic imperative: learn, learn, learn. Rote learning is drudgery: even surgeons don’t need to know all the sulci, tuberosities and foramina of every bone, nor every pulley and conduit of the softer parts as detailed by Alexander Monro in his The Anatomy of the Humane Bones (1726). What isn’t clinically important tends to be forgotten. Cynicism beckons, or you come to grief. My own enduring memory of the anatomy class is its smell, the pungent odour of formalin; it penetrated clothes and gloves, and lingered in the hair, a kind of olfactory ectoplasm from a cold place in which people no longer mattered.

Enter Professor Doktor Günther von Hagens (the ‘von’ is an affectation), who describes himself as ‘inventor, anatomist, physician and synthetic chemist’. In the mid 1970s, at the University of Heidelberg, he developed—and patented—a new technique for preserving biological tissue called plastination. It had taken him fifteen years of experimentation with industrial solvents. Plastination is now used by medical schools across the world for the teaching of gross anatomy. It requires tissues, or whole bodies, to be fixed in the standard way with formaldehyde or some other preservative. Specimens are then dehydrated, a process in which the fluid in the tissues is replaced with a chilled organic solvent such as acetone. The next, and central, step of the process is forced impregnation: the solvent is replaced under vacuum with a polymer, silicone or epoxy resin, producing an object which can then be manipulated in ways that were quite impossible with previous preservation techniques. The final stage involves hardening of the polymer. Tissues can be rendered pliable or hard, and with a high degree of realism. The essential organic architecture of the body is preserved, although it is now about eighty percent plastic. In all, the process takes 500–1000 working hours. It is undoubtedly an elegant technique, and produces specimens which are much more resistant to oxidation and decay than the old formalin-phenol injected bodies. Plastination can give a body 500 years of postmortem standing.

10  A Doctor’s Dictionary

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content