You probably know about the Body Worlds exhibits – we have blogged on it before in various contexts, including The Anonymous Teacher Person’s questions about field trip to a similar exhibit in Atlanta last year (and do check out ATP – she’s not teaching in school at this point, but has a great post (among many) about why she’s going to homeschool her son.

ATP is such a good writer – she has updated her blog – just for us – with an account of her own feelings during the field trip to the exhibit:

So, I went and hid myself behind the partition and attempted to compose myself, while the Friendly Docent Lady leapt into action. "People have a lot of different responses to what they see here." I could feel her desire to use. those. active listening skills. I almost humored her to validate her sense of docent self-esteem, but I couldn’t, really, so I just sort of stammered something about my dad dying and left out the part where Soylent Green is made of PEOPLE! We should not be here, staring. Every one of these men had a mother who changed diapers and felt his head for fever and worried about his future – at least, I pray each of them did. And to end up like this, on display for Americans…

Anyhoo, Body Worlds has exploded and produced imitators, and so, of course now we have a hot mummified body industry in China.

With little government oversight, an abundance of cheap medical school labor and easy access to cadavers and organs — which appear to come mostly from China and Europe — at least 10 other Chinese body factories have opened in the last few years. These companies are regularly filling exhibition orders, shipping preserved cadavers to Japan, South Korea and the United States.

Fierce competition among body show producers has led to accusations of copyright theft, unfair competition and trafficking in human bodies in a country with a reputation for allowing a flourishing underground trade in organs and other body parts.

snip

Premier Exhibitions, a publicly listed company based in Atlanta that created the “Titanic” artifacts exhibitions that began in the 1990’s, recently agreed to pay $25 million to secure a steady supply of preserved bodies from China. Despite the new risks associated with procuring bodies and the prospect of saturating the market, Premier is still betting that the body shows will expand around the world.

“Our body exhibitions will probably surpass ‘Titanic,’ ” which was seen by 17 million people worldwide,” said Arnie Geller, the chief executive of Premier. “And it will probably do that in half the time.”

Experts say exhibitions featuring preserved bodies are now among the most popular attractions at American science and natural history museums. While the shows have not appeared at two of the most respected museums — the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History in New York — they have appeared at major museums in Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles.

“These are blockbuster shows,” said Robert West, who tracks the museum exhibition business for Informal Learning Experiences, a Washington consulting firm. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the robotic dinosaurs came in the 1980’s.” The industry is dogged by questions about the origins of the corpses. Premier says its exhibition uses unclaimed Chinese bodies that the police have given to medical schools. None of the bodies, it says, are those of executed prisoners or people who died of unnatural causes.

“We don’t deal with it directly, but we want to do what is morally and legally correct,” Mr. Geller said. “We traced the whole process. None of these would be executed prisoners.”

And finally, this, if you’ve not had enough:

And so in his large Dalian facility, Dr. von Hagens, (the originator of the concept – bio from his website here) who is a visiting professor at New York University College of Dentistry, is also producing animated videos, books, DVD’s and stuffed toy animals with flaps that reveal easily detachable internal organs. His company is branching out into plastinated animals, which have been featured in a number of shows.

On his tour, he pointed to a large container in the campus yard that he said contained an elephant corpse that had just arrived from a German zoo. Then he entered a warehouse and had workers pull a large bear out of a tank of alcohol, followed by several human bodies he said were ready for dissection and plastination.

“Every specimen is an anatomical treasure,” he said.

He walked amiably through the halls and workshop floors, instructing his employees to open baskets, refrigerators, boxes and stainless steel tanks to show off the human and animal corpses housed inside.

About 260 workers in Dalian process about 30 bodies a year. The workers, who generally earn $200 to $400 a month, first dissect the bodies and remove skin and fat, then put the bodies into machines that replace human fluids with soft chemical polymers.

In a large workshop called the positioning room, about 50 medical school graduates work with the dead: picking fat off the cadavers, placing them in seated or standing positions and forcing the corpses to do lifelike things, such as hold a guitar or assume a ballet position. Dr. von Hagens admits these positions are controversial.

“Even my former manager said, ‘Can you really pose a dead man on a dead horse?’ ’’ Dr. von Hagens said. “But I decided this was real quality.”

As we have discussed this over the years, we’ve had conflicting views. Some are horrified, some have seen it as a fascinating education.

But somehow the spectre of the factory, the competition, the rush to obtain more bodies for the sake of more profit shifts the discussion a bit, I’m thinking. It’s rather similar to what happens when those who support some gentle experimentation on human embryos are asked about the possibility of embryo manufacturing lines and storehouses and growing those embryos for just a few more days or weeks – as long as we can, and then maybe we can harvest something else besides stem cells from them.

Commodification sometimes doesn’t reveals its full face to us at first.  But then the faces multiply and the whole thing just gets too obvious for us to deny.

But in a sense it’s just the logical outcome of a dualistic culture in which a body is detached from spirit, in theory, one indifferent to the other, unaffected, distinct.

Pulling out human bodies from the pots they share with bears. The Revolution will be Plastinated.

Thanks to a commentor – ew. An 18th century predecessor. You really must check it out. The museum’s website. Fetuses dancing a jig. Oy.

And I always think it’s worth contemplating and teasing out the difference between this sort of thing and the Christian reverence for relics, especially in the extreme like the Capuchin crypts and ossuaries…