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'Bodies' is glimpse of what we are

The exhibition coming to Tampa next month illuminates not just our flesh, but also our minds.

By BILL DURYEA
Published July 27, 2005

	Images from 'Bodies Revealed' exhibit

TAMPA - No one has seen the preserved and artfully dissected cadavers that will constitute "Bodies, the Exhibition," but judging by similar shows, they will reveal in fantastic detail the way the human machine works.

An entire vascular system, a tower of sculpted red lace. Muscles peeled back like flower petals. Black lung, too, crumbling bone and arthritic joints - the resilient genius of our design and its predictable frailty.

The exhibitors are bringing a sample - the body of a man - to Tampa today for a news conference where they will explain their preservation technique and the scope of the exhibition.

The actual bodies will reveal so much more.

Even before the first visitor crosses the threshold of the Museum of Science and Industry to view this exhibition, which opens Aug. 20, it has already revealed much about the way society thinks.

"I don't think it says anything untoward or morbid about our culture," said Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. "Everyone wants to know what their insides look like. You never get to see them."

For millenniums we have held deeply contradictory feelings about our corporeal selves. Alternately appalled and intrigued by what we found when we poked around inside, we have lined up to ogle the formaldehyde jars bearing some great man's brain and condemned the body snatchers who fed our curiosity.

But our long-held taboos on the handling of dead bodies seem to have eroded. Attendance figures for the other exhibitions ("Bodies Revealed" and "Body Worlds") register in the hundreds of thousands on every continent they've visited.

"They're like Starbucks now," Roach said of the shows.

The desire to preserve organs and whole bodies is as old as the Egyptians. It seems someone has always been looking for a better way to maintain some bit of flesh long after the original owner ceased to need it. They've used everything from beeswax to mercuric chloride to do it.

The ones who weren't trying to preserve the bodies were often trying to cut them up. For a good cause, of course.

Centuries of medical students have depended on dissecting cadavers for their proper education. The demand for bodies to work on far exceeded supply, however, which led to a widespread illicit trade in stolen corpses. "Resurrectionists," as they were called, routinely dug up graves and sold the bodies to medical schools.

Anatomy theaters at medical schools were equipped with trap doors and secret passages to bring and dispose of the bodies quickly in case authorities came knocking. The crime was not the dissection of the body, but its theft and the violation that entailed.

"The church did not oppose dissection as a matter of doctrine," said Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education for the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. "With the proviso that you were showing respect for the remains of the dead."

Respect was not one of the features of the common "anatomical museums" of the late 1800s. These establishments were glorified freak shows where gentlemen paid 25 cents to view partly dissected and unclothed women, specimens of genitalia, bodies ravaged by disease or the severed head of a murderer, according to Michael Sappol, the curator/historian of the National Library of Medicine.

"A stigma attached itself to institutions that trucked in death and desire, emotions and appetites, corpses and body parts," Sappol writes in Morbid Curiosity: The Decine and Fall of the Popular Anatomical Museum, an article in Common-place, an online journal. "The museum claimed to serve the cause of moral reformation, but it really worked on base emotions and bodily appetites."

Crusading lawmen like New Yorker Anthony Comstock, who complained of displays of "37 filthy penises," closed them all.

The figures in "Bodies" are likely to be anatomically intact, but that is not where critics of previous shows have focused their attention. "Body Worlds," an exhibition that originated in Germany, showed a figure holding his own skin and another posed in prayer clutching his heart.

Father Desmond Daly, pastor of Christ the King Church in Tampa has seen and admired another exhibit: "Bodies Revealed." But he objected to the treatment of the posed bodies.

"Sounds like a Barnum & Bailey circus act: "Come see the naked pygmy,' " he said.

Ultimately, it comes down to us, the viewers, said Bruce Berg, dean of the Florida State University College of Medicine in Sarasota.

"When people see this display for the first time, do they view it with solemnity and whispers or is it all fun and games?" he said. "I would guess that people are quiet and you wouldn't have a lot of guffawing and yelling."

"It's a sanitized sideshow. I kind of compare it to zoos," Roach said. A while back, zoos were getting a bad rap for their treatment of animals. "They had to come up with a patter: "We're building a constituency of preservationists.' Which is all well and good, but it's still a place to gawk at chimpanzees. These are a place to gawk at bodies, and I'm not against that."

[Last modified July 27, 2005, 01:06:11]