This year Union Station's Bodies Revealed exhibit was the focal point of a controversy involving bloggers, religious officials, reporters and any shrill voice that could find its way to an online comments section. Now, four months too late for most of Kansas City to pay attention, a reasoned symposium on plastinated corpses -- with respected experts from impressive schools -- came together at the downtown library on Friday.
After so many months of arguments, the changing official story about
whether the Bodies Revealed cadavers had -- when they were still alive
-- given informed consent to be turned into exhibits and official
statements from the Catholic Church, what was left un-probed?
The only real surprise was that the most interesting points weren't made by bioethics professors or doctors, but by an art history expert.
Barbara Stafford, a professor of art history at the University of Chicago, said that while exhibits like Bodies Revealed and the more popular Body Worlds get by on the idea that you're learning about biology, that's not necessarily true. At this point, we'll paraphrase instead of quoting directly, because the way academics speak reads like those instruction manuals for assembling prefabricated furniture.
Basically, Stafford said, the process that preserves these bodies results in a corpse so bereft of any physical comparison to real dead or living bodies that it could easily be imitated by creating faux corpses with other materials. So, why bother to use humans except as a hook? We know less about the process used to procure and make today's display bodies than we did for corpses that were out for public viewing in the 18th century. The Bodies Revealed subjects are stretched in weird and active poses partially to show muscles working, but also to keep you from noticing how uniformly small they are, and therefore all Asians. The exhibits typically include displays on the history of biological study used as wallpaper designed to make you associate the display with real science.
This went on for quite a while, with the professor pointing out what boiled down to smart, evil marketing decisions, her arguments hinting that the popularity of these exhibits isn't necessarily indicative of any public lust for knowledge. It's more about seeing humans so drastically altered that we're actually preventing ourselves from dealing with the reality of death. But, everybody likes to feel smart, and we'd rather be faced with idealized forms of the body in its most perfect form than the real thing -- even if the muscles have to be pulled taught by replacing their water and fat with plastic.
Presentations on the ethics of viewing and creating plastinated corpses and the ways in which medical students struggle with detachment after dissecting cadavers turned out to be fairly dull, since they dealt wiht the same questions we've heard all year and reached the same conclusions. Yes, people's wishes for their remains should be honored. No, it's not right to kill political prisoners and put them in a traveling show. These discussions also seemed fairly short sighted, arguing that somehow human life had become significantly devalued in the 20th century and citing wars and atrocities as evidence. Apparently the presenters didn't see anything in the previous 2,000 odd years of killing. A doctor cautioned that medical students must learn to act dispassionately but still find ways to deal with patients on a human level.
The delicate balance between cold, clinical detachment and respect for a patient's humanity is the theme of every single episode of House. Once the Fox network is riding your ethical quandaries, you need to at least find something new to say about them. — Peter Rugg
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Great wrap-up. Ever since Body Worlds came to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, I thought it was interesting how these exhibits were framed as science rather than art. Imagine Bodies revealed at the Art Institute or the Nelson or Kemper for that matter. I think you would have seen a lot more controversy because most people need that educational lens to make sense of it and because it gives them a degree of comfort with disturbing artifacts.
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