No skin ON

OooOOoooo….the body world’s exhibit at the museum is just on my mind. Days later and I’m still thinking about it, still forming ideas and still in awe. It was interesting, sad, intellectual, grotesque, and beautiful all at once.

Hundreds of REAL HUMAN specimens ‘plastinized’ (is that even a word?) and carefully dissected and displayed. Awesome! These real human bodies of men, women, and children displayed with no skin let you see (quite literally) the inner workings of the body. You could see the muscles, the organs, the nerves the skeleton, and everything else inside from every angle.

Upon entering, the first display made me just stop and think, “Is that REAL?” It is almost too much to take in, my mind was in shock, I ended up spending so much time looking at the first body, at a person who used to eat, drink, and maybe even look at exhibits in a museum. Just frozen in plastic. The bodies were posed and seemed ‘ultra’-real, there was a teacher, a runner, an almost voyeuristic look at a mother and her unborn child, a family holding hands, and more.

It is gruesome to know that they are real and individuals…but with no skin, no color, no religion, they are just people. Just the same mix of red and yellow and blue as anybody.
They are just a mix of many complex systems intertwined and working as one machine. A beautifully engineered machine who’s creation may have been more in exercise in ‘beauty than utility.’

This exhibit, this human body may be more appropriately placed in an art museum rather than one devoted to science.

Check out http://latitude.blogspot.com for Z’s take on this.