Publicity still doesn't prepare you for 'Bodies'
By SUE CARLTON
Published August 24, 2005
"This is plastic, right?" the woman said, reaching for the grayish-beige lump on the counter.
"No, ma'am," said the museum worker in the MOSI shirt. "That's a real brain."
The woman hesitated, then picked it up anyway, hefting its weight. After all, how often do you get to hold a real human brain? And besides, there was a jar of hand sanitizer nearby.
More than 12,000 people poured through the doors of the Museum of Science and Industry to see the controversial "Bodies, the Exhibition" by Sunday night. Hundreds more have gone already this week. After the record-breaking opening, I thought I should see what the fuss was about. Yes, I had been put off by the ethical issues raised over how the dead bodies had been procured from China. And, yes, I thought that opening the show days early, even as the state Anatomical Board denied MOSI approval, was a little undignified, particularly given the argument that "Bodies" is about education, not exploitation. But in the end, the show went on, and packed them in to boot.
If you've seen the gazillions of newspaper photos of "Bodies," and how could you have missed them, you probably have a sense of the rawness of a display that includes 20 preserved, exposed and posed cadavers, plus hundreds of human organs and assorted body parts.
Well, it's a thousand times more powerful in the flesh. So to speak.
The first body is in a disconcertingly jaunty pose, a hitchhiker with his thumb out. Another has a soccer ball at his toe in midkick. Another raises a baton to conduct an unseen orchestra. Another still is split in half.
Skin has been peeled back to show the details of slabs of meaty muscle and tendons and gristle and bone. Organs are out in the open. Privates are not at all private. And then you notice this body, this person, still has his fingernails and toenails.
So "Bodies" is not for the faint of heart. I'm not even sure it's for people who get a little weak-kneed deboning a chicken for dinner, like me.
But how fascinating it is.
The crowd stopped to marvel at the curve of a spine, at the tiny bones that make up a foot - real bones, not plastic ones. People would point at body parts and then touch the corresponding parts of themselves, as if they were saying, so that's what it's like under there.
We looked inside a human hand and held out our own hands beside it, seeing the moving parts under our skin. We bent our elbows back and forth next to the exposed muscle and bone of one on display.
Belly buttons were cupped flowers of flesh. The inside of a woman's breast, usually a picture on a doctor's office chart, was right in front of you, a wonder.
The exhibit is dark and quiet, and there seemed to be no smell at all. Mostly it was hands-off, though in one area the curious could touch assorted parts.
We looked at the innards of innards. We saw what a burst appendix looks like, a brain with a stroke, a placenta from triplets.
We saw something that sounds a lot more romantic than it looks, believe me - a glimpse of what's inside a person's heart.
When I was done with all that looking, I made my way through the lobby, past the giant dinosaur and the gift shop, and walked outside into the sunshine. Across the way was a building that said BioWorks Butterfly Garden on the side, so I went in.
The place was alive with butterflies. Striped and big as swallows, tiny and yellow, they lit on the plumbago blooms and fluttered past your ear.
Nobody seemed to mind that it was sweltering. We just stood and watched them.
The man in the MOSI shirt told us that many of the butterflies live an average of only two weeks. Two weeks, he said.
But right then, standing in the sun next to those other people, even that short time seemed like a thing to be wondered at.
Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com