Are these grotesque anatomy lessons really educational?

One of Pope John Paul II’s towering achievements was his “theology of the body” This is commonly regarded as a fresh presentation of Catholic views on sexuality, but it is far more than that. It’s about the deep respect owed to the human body, with of all its limitations and frailties. 

“The human person is a unity of body and soul, and the body is capable of expressing the spiritual and divine mystery of the person,” he wrote.  

Often people are puzzled by the church’s objections to issues like the pill, abortion, surrogacy, euthanasia, or transgenderism. Ultimately, the answer lies in the core Christian insight that the human body is suffused with an infinite dignity; it’s not just a carcass, a corpse, a stiff, or carrion. It is, in a sense, sacred.  

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That is the fundamental principle underlying Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical about responsible parenthood and contraception. There are boundaries on procreation, he wrote, “because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions.”  

That’s why an exhibition of plastinated human corpses capering and cavorting in Uptown, a shopping centre in Brisbane’s CBD, is so disturbing. “Body Worlds: The Anatomy of Happiness” and similar events have been smash hits around the world. The organisers claim that its shows have “captivated” 56 million visitors in 170 cities. In 2018 “Body Worlds Vital” appeared in Melbourne.  

The Brisbane show runs from late July to early October. It’s not cheap—a single adult ticket costs $30.  

Admittedly, the technique of preserving human bodies and body parts is amazing. Its inventor, a media-savvy, entrepreneurial German anatomist named Dr Gunther von Hagens, developed a technique for extracting bodily fluids and soluble fat from a corpse and replacing them with resins, silicon rubbers and epoxies.  

The result is odourless, dry artefacts which display muscles, nerves, sinews, blood vessels, and organs in incredible detail. As a tool for teaching anatomy, “plastination” must be superb.  

But Body Worlds is not really an anatomy lesson; it’s a freak show. 

It turns out that after you have turned up your toes, more creative things can be done with your remains than pushing up daisies. You can have your tissues filled with resin and your limbs contorted into a flayed mannequin displaying your innards to gawking crowds as you play basketball, leap hurdles, ride a horse, play chess, or (in past exhibits elsewhere) have sexual intercourse.  

Von Hagens is 80 years old and suffers from Parkinson’s disease. Death–and plastination–is not far away. He is looking forward to becoming a flayed and frozen statue welcoming visitors to a Body World exhibition somewhere.  

It will be a modest form of immortality, but it’s about as good as it gets, he believes. “I don’t think there is a continuum beyond death,” he told The Guardian a few years ago. “Every deceased body I have seen has shown me the absence of the soul. I don’t believe anything is left of us after we die.”   

This is not a philosophy for “expressing the spiritual and divine mystery of the person”. It is a degrading spectacle, the modern counterpart of a Barnum and Bailey circus, flounced up with philosophical fripperies.  

Being appalled at this is not a uniquely Christian sentiment. Even the ancient Greeks treated the bodies of their loved ones with immense respect. It was a crime not to inter them properly.  

Exhibiting corpses for profit is a “violation of the respect owed to them,” a judge in France, a thoroughly secular country, ruled in 2009. “Under the law, the proper place for corpses is in the cemetery.”  

Von Hagens and his company defend the displays by asserting that the persons who once inhabited these bodies gave their informed consent to being turned into an anatomical fun fair.  

But what if all the “i”s had been jotted and the “t”s had been crossed? There is something deeply unsettling about these mannequins which an informed consent form cannot put to rest. And if they did consent, did their loved ones consent? 

Once upon a time these grotesqueries were living, breathing people. Isn’t undressing them, removing their skin, treating them as commercial property, and displaying them in poses which provoke ribald smirks a degradation of our humanity? Isn’t it a kind of 3-D pornography masquerading as science?  

There are limits to informed consent. An oft-quoted example is professional dwarf-tossing— a boozy pub sport which originated in Australia in the 1980s. When a town in France banned it in 2002, one of the dwarves objected. He was participating freely and being treated as a basketball was his livelihood.  

The case went all the way to the Conseil d’État, the French counterpart to our High Court. It dismissed the dwarf’s appeal to autonomy. Allowing himself to be used as a mere projectile compromised his dignity, it said. The dwarf then appealed to the UN’s Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Committee—which upheld the ban “in order to protect public order and considerations of human dignity”.  

“Prepare to be amazed and gain a deeper understanding of what it truly means to be human,” says the Body Worlds website.  

Amazed? Possibly. Wiser? Not at all. It’s no way to treat your kids on a rainy afternoon.