Undressed

After lunch with Frank, a friend of ours from Japan, and his girlfriend, Dave and I went to the Bodies exhibit near the South Street Seaport. The area reminds me of Cannery Row - clean, touristy, kitschy.

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last few years, Bodies is an exhibit in which real cadavers have been dissected, preserved, and positioned to show different structures and systems. Pamala, Frank's girlfriend, told us that the bodies were all from China, which explained why they seemed so small.

My student ID card got me a $10 discount on the price of admission, which I was crowing about until Dave made a sarcastic comment that my thousands of dollars of tuition were really starting to pay off. Hmph. It wasn't terribly crowded, and the people that shared the exhibition with us were hushed as they walked around, looking at the figures from all angles and reading the placards. Different rooms were devoted to different systems: skeletal, muscular, nervous, reproductive, etc. I'd seen this sort of thing before on a much smaller scale when I was a faculty advisor one summer for the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine, but I was responsible for a group of kids then, and this time I could give my full attention to the specimens. After the initial ew-that's-actually-a-real-person weirdness (faces still have eyelashes and eyebrows, and most of the complete bodies weren't behind glass so you could get quite close), it was really interesting. Dave made a few comments comparing different parts on display to various meat dishes, and I was glad to be a vegetarian. Each room had at least one complete body, stripped down to different degrees to show bones, cartilage, muscles, organs, or whatever. Aside from that, there were lots of display cases with isolated parts like a kidney or a pelvis or a brain. Often, there would be two of something with different parts removed, like a shoulder joint with tendons and one without so that you could get a clear look at the bones underneath.

Most impressive, I thought were the displays showing the circulatory system (see the circulatory system in a pair of lungs above). Apparently the cadavers used were injected with a polymer, and once it had hardened inside the veins and arteries, the tissue was removed (otherwise it would be too delicate and complex to remove and display). The first time I looked at a map of the Tokyo rail transit system it reminded me of a diagram of the human circulatory system, and I was reminded of that experience today. The complexity (of both) is really amazing.

Dave, a smoker, said that the slices of brains of stroke victims made him want to quit more than the blackened lungs did - and since the cadavers were all from China, most of them had blackened lungs. There were also kidneys with stones in them, tumors, and various body parts with cancers. A liver with cirrhosis. Polyps along the inside of an intestinal wall. Pretty gross. From an educational standpoint, I'd have loved to see more on obesity; there was one plump-ish cadaver, and I didn't feel that they explained the risks of being overweight very thoroughly. That would shock people into thinking twice before supersizing at the drive-thru (although I guess scare tactics weren't the principle purpose here). I would have been interested to see other ailments too, more common ones, like arthritic knuckles perhaps. And there was no space devoted to the eye, although if they wanted to use only real bodies and no larger models, I guess that would be sort of tough to do.

All in all, a very interesting exhibit, that I'd highly recommend.