Dead Souls

The Bodies Revealed exhibit was “real,” “fascinating” and profoundly immoral

By Alistair Highet

There’s a French expression L’esprit de l’escalier, which more or less means the thing you wish you had said at the party, that occurs to you as you are leaving, walking down the stairway. So these thoughts fall into that category somewhat. But as I drove into work I saw a billboard for the Bodies Revealed exhibit, that was supposed to be installed at XL Center until the end of last month. In the end, they pulled out of Hartford early, having gotten a better offer elsewhere in either a livelier or more ghoulish town, I suppose. One or the other.

Anyway, it was essentially a presentation of 10 complete human bodies preserved through a process of “plastination” developed by German scientist Gunther van Hagens. The bodies themselves — the dead people — come from China. The first such exhibit in the 1990s was presented as avant garde art. That raised some hackles. So now there are a number of touring exhibits going around the world, presented as science education. The bodies themselves are the property of Dalian Medical University in China, and are leased to Premier Exhibitions.

Questions have been asked about where these people, turned into plastic for your amusement, come from. The official story is that they are unclaimed cadavers of people who died of natural causes. There have been questions raised about this claim. In 2006, the New York Times found that there was a “ghastly new underground mini-industry” that was thriving in the creation of these objects with “little government oversight, an abundance of cheap medical school labor and easy access to cadavers and organs.” A prominent human rights activist, Harry Wu has raised the possibility that some of these bodies may come from prisoners who have been executed or died in prison. The thing is, who really knows?

But let’s assume for the moment that the motives involved — from the murkiest corner of China all the way to the XL Center in Hartford — are and were nothing but the most piously scientific.

There are still things to consider: first, what if it was Uncle Peter or your little sister who were turned into plastic, in say, Tulsa, and were now posed with badminton rackets delighting spectators in Beijing? Does it feel a little different now? I suspect that if we were turning white Anglo-Saxons into plastic objects for export to China, that there would be a little more squirming going on.

Even more worrying is what it means to turn bodies into objects for other uses. Most religious traditions dispose of bodies with a certain degree of solemnity. They are interred, they are cremated, the ashes are scattered in the Ganges. We have historically recognized a mystery of life in the solemn contemplation of the dead. And further, certainly in Catholic theology, the idea is held that man is a soul-body composite, that the body is not a mere “shell” but that soul and body are a spiritual unity, and hence the body will be resurrected. To think otherwise is a Gnostic heresy. You don’t need to believe this. But such a belief preserves a respect for life itself by ensuring that we don’t think the spirit is liberated by fleeing the shackles of the body. That is a dangerous, destructive idea once it takes hold.

We give the bodies of the dead respect because we distinguish them as spiritualized matter. It is worth noting, that for instance, in the Second World War, German soldiers killed by the allies were buried. In the Pacific Theater, Japanese were often burned in heaps or left to rot. It seems that whether we treat the dead with the respect or not is contingent on to what degree we acknowledge a human kinship. Obviously, these people formerly at the XL Center and now wowing audiences elsewhere, are no kin of ours.

Finally, if we are going to turn dead people into objects of spectacle, why stop there? Couldn’t we just as easily, say, turn them into dog food? What’s the difference? Dog food would be more useful. Remember, the Germans experimented with making people into soap, lampshades and leathergoods. At the time there were plenty of Germans who thought that was OK, because the people involved weren’t fully human and didn’t deserve to be treated any better once they were dead.