Bring Out Your Dead: Touring Corpses and the Yuck Factor

In his Histories , Herodotus relates a curious anecdote about the Persian king Darius. Gathering a group of Greeks who were presently at his court, the king asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that no sum of money would entice them to commit such a despicable act. As Herodotus relates the story:

He then sent for certain Indians, of the race called Callatians, men who eat their fathers, and asked them, while the Greeks stood by, and knew by the help of an interpreter all that was said, — “What he should give them to burn the bodies of their fathers at their decease?” The Indians exclaimed aloud, and bade him forbear such language. Such is men’s wont herein; and Pindar was right, in my judgment, when he said, “Custom is the king o’er all.”

Cultural relativism may not be sovereign over all but it does appear to rule over matters concerning the dead. The way a culture treats their dead—burning, burying, eating, etc.—often provides a key to understanding the way they view the human body. What then does it say about a culture that injects the dead with plastic, puts them on public display, and then allows the parts to be sold?

For the past fifteen years, museums across the country have shown the touring exhibition called “Body Worlds.” The exhibit includes provactively posed human bodies and organs, all embalmed by a process called “plastination,” in which body fluids are replaced with liquid plastic. The plastination process was invented in 1977 by Gunther von Hagens , a former resident and lecturer in the Institute of Pathology and the Institute of Anatomy at the Heidelberg University. After patenting the process of preserving anatomical specimens with reactive polymers, von Hagens started his own company, BIODUR Products and founded the Heidelberg-based Institute for Plastination. In 1995 he premiered the Body Worlds exhibition in Japan. The exhibit and it’s follow-up, Body Worlds 2 have grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide.

Recently, von Hagens has begun selling them too :

A whole body costs about €70,000, torsos start at €55,644 and heads come in at about €22,000 each - excluding postage and packaging.

For those on a tighter budget, transparent body slices are available from €115 each.

Who would want to buy a piece of a corpse? What compels such curiosity? Michael Sappol, a historian at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., and the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century America , says it’s the feeling that, This is my body. And you’re not wrong to look at a dead body and think, This is death.”

In describing her reaction to viewing the “Body Worlds 2” in 2005, Ann Althouse wrote:

The bodies were amazing — beautiful. You can look into a real human body and see the details of the organs —not bloody and pulsating — but perfectly preserved. You know nothing about each individual — who he was, how he died. But there he is, more fully exposed than a nude, for you to walk right up to and inspect.

Not everyone shares Althouse’s aesthetic taste. Law professor Steve Bainbridge expressed his reaction as:

Yuck. Double yuck. I want it banned and the harm principle can be damned. Do I have a reasoned analysis of how to fit the yuck factor into a coherent political theory? No. And I don’t care. Some things are just too yucky for a civilized society to tolerate. This is what Leon Kass calls the “wisdom of repugnance,” which makes good sense to me in this case and a number of others. (German cannibals and Swedish pet lovers spring to mind as other recent examples.)

While I share Bainbridge’s appreciation for the moral intuition behind the “yuck factor” and the “wisdom of repugnance,” I don’t think we can allow them to have the final word on an issue that is rooted in cultural conventions. I do, however, understand the response. When I first learned of the exhibit six years ago, my reaction was much the same: Yuck. Double Yuck. But having viewed the cadavers on display, I think I’ve formed a more nuanced view. My reaction is similar, but not quite as vehemently expressed, to that of an anonymous blogger “PPK”:

There is a form of “sophistication” which entails deadening one’s own sense of abomination by repeated exposure to that which triggers it.

You start with thrillers, violent dramas, horror movies, weird or disturbing porn, inurement to bad habits, vices and fantasies of vice, sick ideas which have no embodiment other than their expression, and somewhere in there you will find ‘art’ like this - all in the name of experiencing ‘reality’, or being ‘tolerant’ or ‘openness to new ideas’, or ‘freedom’.

In effect, it’s somewhat like an adrenaline junky who needs more dangerous X-treme sports to get the same high. Similarly, its end is that you’ve done all these things - for what exactly?

What it does is serves to deform the character, diminishes the finer sense, creates a set of blind spots to the underlying injustice and leading to a tolerance for man’s inhumanity to man, and to objective evil.

The pseudo-sophistication is really just a degeneration of sense into apathy - jadedness. The pseudo-benefit is that one is no longer shocked by anything. The underlying problem is that - one is no longer shocked by anything, including those things that we ourselves do. A viscious descent into a self-actualized, waking hell.

What type of person wants to see their fellow humans flayed and displayed for the satiation of curiosity? Some people might argue that there is some benefit to be obtained from the realism. But while they may be real human bodies, the plastination process renders them very unreal and plastic-like.

Which raises another uncomfortable question: If exact replicas could be carved from plastic without the use of real cadavers, would we be as compelled to plunk down the $25 for admission? Sadly, I suspect the answer is that we would not.

Why then does the morbid equation change by the mere addition of a formerly living human being? What grotesque impulse lead me to pay for an anatomical exhibit that was not based on “ This is my body” but on ” This is death”?

Maybe I don’t really want to know the answers to those troubling questions. I might be disgusted by what I find lurking not only in my own psyche but in that of my fellow humans who also viewed the exhibit over the past decade. Maybe the motivations are best left hidden since, to paraphrase Steve Bainbridge, some things are just too yucky for a civilized person to tolerate.