ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, a large number of popular anatomical exhibitions – Body Worlds, The Amazing Human Body, Bodies: The Exhibition, Bodies Revealed, Our Body, à corps ouvert, Our Body: The Universe Within, Body Exploration and Mysteries of the Human Body – have toured across the UK, United States, Europe, Australia and Asia to great popular success. Advertised as ‘the anatomical display of real human bodies’, these exhibitions feature écorché figures (that is, bodies whose skin has been removed to reveal the internal anatomy), preserved through a process of plastination (in which the organic fluids are replaced with a clear synthetic polymer). Displays include whole bodies and dissected figures, as well as single organs, parts of the skeleton, the vascular system, and so on. All of these exhibitions owe their exhibitory styles and the availability of plastinated bodies on which they depend to the foundational work of Gunther von Hagens, the German anatomist who invented the process of plastination, and whose Body Worlds was both the first of these anatomical exhibitions and remains the best known. 1 (Body Worlds claims to have received over 26 million visitors since its first show, in Tokyo, in 1995.)
