Today, we (my Bio class) went to the BodyWorlds exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. Pretty much, it’s dead bodies that a scientist preserved using a process called plastination.
But these bodies weren’t just dead. In different bodies, different systems were displayed–one body showed the nervous system, another showed the circulatory, etc. One showed a guy holding a cigarette whose lungs were black and he was all shriveled.
The really weird part was that these bodies were positioned in very lifelike poses–a basketball player, an archer, a man riding a horse (the horse was real too), a chess player. And those props (the basketball, the bow, the chessboard, etc) were all there too. So it was a dead body with its skin gone, showing parts of its body–some muscles, some bones, some tubes–holding a basketball. Really weird.
It sort of reminded me of our recent pig dissection in Bio. Yes, we dissected fetal pigs. Jon and I named our pig “Some Pig.” (”Dr. Jon” did most of the operating procedures, and “Nurse Lia” served as an important helper.) That was quite an experience. The only really annoying part of the dissection is when people compared parts of the body to food. “Wow, the liver really looks like a potato pancake,” or “Those small intestines look like the pasta I had for dinner last night!” Comments like those are unnecessary.
