On Saturday I went to see the Universe Within exhibit at the Nob Hill
Masonic Center at 1111 California Street. The exhibit was a show of 200 human
bodies and organs that had been preserved through plastination. Several whole
specimens placed in poses with their skin cut into patterns stood looming
over the stunned observers as well as cases and cases of organs, bones and
blood vessels . The whole experience was
amazing and disgusting.
The bodies and specimens have been shipped to California from The Museum
of Life Sciences in Beijing, China, where many more plastic corpses are
stored. The show is intended for educational purposes. I must say, it is
quite educational to see your own insides and muscles filleted before you in
a glass case. The exhibit is divided into anatomical systems.
The process used to preserve these bodies is called Plastination. It was
invented in 1977 by an ex-political prisoner of Eastern Germany Dr. Gunther
Von Hagen at Heidelberg University. Plastination is a chemical process that
stops the decomposition of human tissue by removing all bacterial
nourishment. This is done by first replacing all the fats and water with
acetone and then replacing the acetone with Polymer, a liquid plastic.
The pieces were remarkably strange. I was greeted by a person on a
bicycle with a deranged skeletal grin and flaking tendons standing out all
down his neck. My favorite piece was a man in mid-run with slices of muscle
fillet standing off of each limb like a peacock's feathers. His eyes looked
into the distance mournfully. Another breathtaking body was a man who's
muscles were exposed in layers. He looked at the ceiling while holding up a
hanger in his left hand over which his skin was draped. Most educational of
all were the two torsos of a man and a woman that had been built from various
corpses. Their entire front halves had been removed, displaying their guts.
Disturbingly enough, the only outer body pieces that had not been removed
were the genitalia. While the man's looked like it had come with that torso,
the female's was simply a circle of skin glued onto the pelvic bone. That was
quite disgusting. The most beautiful section was that of the cardiovascular
system. Whole humans and limbs were reconstructed using only blood vessels,
making these pieces look like ghosts draped in red lace. There were several
pieces showing the effects of different illnesses like a smoker's lung, which
was spotted and gray; and stroke effected brain which was black with all the
neurons fused together on one side. It was all fascinating and terrible.
Overall, this exhibit awakened me once again to the incredible thing that
carries me around all day: namely, my body. It was not quite as sickening as
I suspected, because the bodies all really seem like they're plastic…
which they are, in a way. It seems a little like photography, like using
something already existing to make a sculpture rather than doing it yourself.
They really seemed more like sculptures. Anyhow, I'll probably have
strange dreams for a few days…
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