Gunther von Hagens finally gets US show
In LA with $12 to spend? See
Body Worlds. (First mention in hippoblog
here.)
Wired News: Cadavers Steal the Show in L.A.The credit, or the blame, for the show belongs to a German doctor named Gunther von Hagens who's no stranger to public attention. A Poland native and political protester who spent two years in an East German prison, von Hagens developed a procedure called plastination in the 1970s to preserve bodies and body parts. In a process similar to embalming, workers preserve bodies by replacing fluids with polymers that allow various degrees of rigidity or flexibility.
"The body is frozen in time between death and decay," von Hagens said.
Initially, anatomists used plastination to preserve body parts for anatomy classes at medical schools, which are moving away from traditional dissection. But von Hagens had bigger, more public, aspirations for the technique. He wanted to expose our insides to the outside.
"Laypeople have the same right as a physician to see the inside of a body," said the 59-year-old doctor...
* Ray, 9/07/2004 01:58:24 PM
