Plastified cadavers

Yesterday, I went to Toronto with my brother and his family to see BodyWorlds. This exhibit, which was at the Ontario Science Centre, features dead bodies that have been "plastified" and then sculpted into different normal human activities (and a few less than normal activities).

You might find, for example, a flayed human doing a ski jump or a dance move, with bits of themselves opened up so that you can see into their organs. It's kind of hard to describe, but I recall seeing a lot of things on TV about the guy who does it: Dr. Gunther something or other. It caused a lot of controversy when the exhibit was in the US - probably because there is one whole section of prenatal development, including a pregnant woman (she donated her body knowing that she wouldn't carry to term).

The plastification process preserves all the muscles, nerves and internal organs, but the bodies do not, for the most part, have skin or subcutaneous fat. The eyes are glass, and in some cases, you can even see eyebrows, eyelashes or even body hair.

Those who know me as a squeamish person can imagine that I had some difficulty looking at the insides of dead people... which passed as I became more fascinated. Besides, it looks fake -- even though it is all 100% real. Also, there were a few other mini-displays of all the major internal organs, some of which were diseased.

As fascinating as it all was, I kind of wished that there could have been more information. Who were these people when they were alive? How old were they? Where did they live? By plastifying their remains, we knew nothing of them, except that they had lived and died. I missed the more human element.

Afterwards, we toured around the rest of the Science Centre, which has recently been renovated (so it was better than when I was chaperoning a school trip there last year with Ioana!).