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The Body Worlds brand
The aim of the Institute for Plastination is to produce human specimens and make them available both for basic and continuing medical training as well as for the general medical education of the public.
It is the exhibitions for the 'education of the public' that causes issues; these were originally developed as 'artistic' displays of corpses and toured Europe and Asia for a decade. Von Hagens received a panning from many art critics in the UK when he exhibited for the first time in London in 2002. Shortly after this, and possibly seeing the success his rival Premier was having with its more science-focused show, Dr von Hagens re-branded his work as 'educational' and presented it as the 'original' real corpse science exhibition under the Body Worlds brand.
The Body Worlds exhibitions, which feature preserved human bodies and body parts, have been seen by nearly 25 million visitors across the world.
First seen in Japan in 1995, the exhibitions are now among the most popular attractions at American science and natural history museums, and have taken an estimated £250 million in revenue.
Body Worlds first visited London in 2002 and 850,000 people attended.
The mastermind behind Body Worlds is Dr Gunther von Hagens, a German scientist who in 1977 devised the technique for preserving anatomical specimens by infusing them with polymers, a process called plastination.
He began touring the world with his plastinated bodies, displaying preserved, skinless human corpses with their well-defined muscles and sinewy tissues. These were the first public anatomical exhibitions of real human plastinates.
Some body parts are on display, e.g. a coal miner's lung, a metastasized liver, but what draws the crowds are the dissected corpses posed in lifelike attitudes: a man riding a horse, a woman pregnant with an eight-month-old foetus, people skateboarding, ski-jumping, and dancing.
Von Hagens has been repeatedly accused of using bodies from deceased persons who did not give consent, such as prison inmates and hospital patients from Kyrgyzstan and executed prisoners from China (the latter led to a lawsuit against the German magazine Der Spiegel, which von Hagens won).
He maintains that all full bodies exhibited in Body Worlds came from donors who gave informed consent. As he controls the supply chain of bodies for exhibition this may be true, the origin of smaller single body parts is questioned and the origin of bodies held by the Institute for Plantation, which will not be used in exhibitions, has also been questioned.
A commission set up by the California Science Center in Los Angeles in 2004 confirmed von Hagens' claims. However, von Hagens does not make the same claim for all bodies prepared by his Plastination Institute, only the ones exhibited in Body Worlds. (above contains extracts from this article)
The Body Worlds website says: "Recent media reports have wrongfully stated that Gunther von Hagens' BODY WORLDS uses bodies other than donor bodies in its exhibitions. Gunther von Hagens' BODY WORLDS refutes the statements in their entirety, as they are factually incorrect. Gunther von Hagens' BODY WORLDS is the only anatomical exhibit that uses donated bodies, willed by donors for the express purpose of serving BODY WORLDS mission to educate the public about health and anatomy. Excluding a small number of specimens acquired from anatomical collections and anatomy programs, the plastinated specimens on display in Gunther von Hagens' BODY WORLDS exhibitions stem from a unique Body Donation Program established in Heidelberg, Germany in 1982, later managed by the Institute for Plastination (IfP) established in 1993."
The Institute for Plastination has a donor roster of over 8500 individuals, mostly German. In the UK an estimated 180 have signed to give their body to the Institute.
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