Koerperwelten Augsburg

Just back from Augsburg, where we spent about 2 hours taking a look at "Koerperwelten" (literally "body worlds") - an exhibit showing the human body, in detail. The somewhat controversial exhibit uses the donated bodies of people who are carefully preserved after their death in a year-long process which essentially turns them into plastic models. The point of the exhibition? Education for the most part - a detailed and intimate look beneath the skin at the bones, muscles, nerves, organs and other tissues.

Thoughts? Well, perhaps worth going to once, but nothing overwhelmingly new. There was a faint whiff of formaldehyde around the place (maybe I am just sensitive to this...), a slight feeling of the macabre, and overall a level of information provided in a standard high school biology class. Still, you pause for a moment when you hear statistics like the fact that if all your blood vessels were lined up (veins, arteries, capillaries, everything), the distance would wrap around the earth 9 times.

The theme for the exhibit in Augsburg was "The Heart" - there are a few travelling exhibitions - as I understand it, the one showing in Berlin focuses on sex.

When I was 15 or 16 I went with my dad to his work a couple times and watched while he performed a few autopsies (another thing completely). But for all the controversy this series of exhibits generates, I had to really wonder a bit. While the bodies there were once living humans, today they are just plastic. Their souls are elsewhere and the people who donated the former containers of their spirits did so willingly...