Steve Pratt is amazed by the beauty and intricacy of the human body at the controversial Body Worlds Vital exhibition in Newcastle

AS the boy in the film Sixth Sense said, “I see dead people”. But these aren’t corpses as we usually see them. These are real human bodies preserved and presented in a unique way.

Body Worlds Vital, the latest edition of an exhibition displaying corpses that has been seen by more than 38 million people worldwide, is being shown for the first time in the UK at the Life Science Centre, in Newcastle.

The idea, and possibly even the image on the poster of a skeleton without skin and bone, might make you go “yuk” and conjure up gory images from horror movies. And there are a couple of skeletons that could have played Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho on show, but the reality is that many of the cadavers have an unexpected beauty and grace.

The Northern Echo:
VITAL SIGNS: The human bodies in the exhibition have been preserved using the plastination technique invented by Dr Gunther von Hagens, husband of exhibition curator Dr Angelina Whalley, left. The couple fell in love after meeting over a dissection table

This “encounter with your inner life”, in which you can literally look inside yourself, or rather the people who’ve donated their bodies and organs to be used in the work of German anatomist Dr Gunther von Hagens. He invented plastination, a technique used for preserving biological tissue specimens. He’s also the man who performed the first public autopsy in the UK for 170 years in 2002, despite being warned that it was a criminal offence. No action was taken against him and the autopsy was shown on Channel 4.

His wife, Dr Angelina Whalley, director of the Institute of Plastination and curator of the Body Worlds exhibitions, officially opened the Newcastle display. She and von Hagens met, appropriately enough you might think, over a dissection table at Heidelberg University in Germany, in 1986.

“My vision was to become a surgeon and I thought it would be a great idea to have a little extra qualification by working for a year or so in anatomy,” she explains. “This is literally where we met, in the dissection class. We fell in love and ever since we’ve been working together. I worked three years in anatomy and two years in pathology, then took over the company and we had this idea of public exhibitions.”

She relates how von Hagens invented plastination in 1977 when a scientific programme in which he was involved required slicing a kidney. I don’t pretend to understand, but polymer baths, a dehydrated piece of kidney and a vacuum were involved. “It was pretty bold,” she says of his actions. “The piece of kidney was pretty shrunken and almost totally black. I guess I would have thrown it away.”

Instead, Von Hagens used the idea to develop plastination.

At that point he had no idea his corpse preservation method would lead to his work being seen all over the world. A minor exhibition for a German insurance company in 1978 started it all when the organisers, who knew his work, borrowed specimens for an evening class.

“We liked the idea so much and came up with the idea of exhibitions. At that time, we didn’t have full body specimens and not all the organs to show the whole human body, but that first exhibition was tremendously successful with 14,000 visitors in two weeks in a very tiny town in Germany,” says Dr Whalley.

“But how could we take human specimens meant to educate students under the roof of a university to the marketplace? There were ethical questions.

We had no chance to proceed, so we shelved the idea.”

An invitation to contribute to an exhibition marking the 100th anniversary of the Anatomical Society in Japan proved the spur for the current Body Worlds brand. The organisers hoped for 150,000 visitors, they got 450,000. “People stood in line to get in, but what was most striking was to see how moved people were,” she says.

“A very remarkable story was told to me by a younger woman, maybe 25 or so. She cried and said she had tried to commit suicide three times and had always felt useless and worth nothing. But now she realised how wonderful and intricate the body was, she felt she had something wonderful inside her and promised she would never try to kill herself again.

“It was very moving for Gunther and me. We decided we had to continue with this idea and the rest is history.”

Von Hagens had already initiated a body donation programme for corpses to use in his work. The specimens, organs and body slices on show in Body Worlds are a mix of young and old, healthy and sick. He now has 14,000 volunteers on file.

The Northern Echo:

Body Works isn’t just a freak show of dead bodies.

There’s a serious point to it – showing people inside themselves so they understand their bodies better. Dr Whalley points to post-visit surveys that show nine per cent of visitors stopped smoking, 33 per cent were eating healthier food and 25 per cent were taking more exercise.

“From my point of view, being a physician at heart, that’s the true success of Body Worlds – that it changes peoples’ views of themselves and has the power to reshape their lives or at least make people rethink their lifestyle,” she says.

“As a physician I always hoped to cure one patient at a time, but Body Worlds allows me to do preventive medicine. It reminds us that our body is not just a divine gift and we have a lifelong responsibility for it.”

Diseases and medical conditions are featured in the exhibits. Among them the pancreas, the urinary tract, reproductive organs, intestine, appendix, a knee joint with arthritis and smokers’ lungs (not a pretty sight).

But the set pieces are the showstoppers, with labels such as the relay runner, tightrope walker, badminton player and arterial man. New kinds of anatomical dissection have been used to open up these plastinated figures in various ways to get right inside the human body. They become works of art in themselves as in The Modern Leonardo, where the body shell has been split longtitudinally, or The Guitar Player, where the plastination shows all the muscles just below the skin.

It sounds gruesome and ghoulish, perhaps, but exposure to it makes you think differently. You can certainly see and learn amazing stuff about your body. Or you could just view the exhibition as a giant art installation.