‘This show sets a trend for dressing up showmanship as science’
Whether one has a problem with the premise of Anatomy for Beginners and its ilk (such as the abortion footage Channel 4 screened last year), must surely be a matter of philosophical taste.
When it comes to Professor Gunther von Hagens however, I have to confess that I am “one of those who find it difficult to get beyond the hat and the German accent” (see interview with Professor John Lee). For starters, looking like a more vindictive older brother of Herr Lick from ‘Allo ‘Allo can’t be the best image to present when dissecting people on television.
What’s more, his C.V. reads like that of a Bond super-villain: born in 1945 in Poznan (now part of Poland) as a haemophiliac, the young von Hagens became fascinated with all things necrotic during his many long stays in hospital. Later witnessing his first autopsy at the age of 17, he was encouraged to take up medicine as a career. Arrested whilst at University, von Hagens spent two years as an East German political prisoner, his freedom bought by the West for 43,000 Deutschmarks. Thus able to complete his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in 1975, with such a comic book-esque history one might have expected that at this point he would promptly become criminally insane and plot the downfall of mankind.
Not so. Whilst working at Heidelberg in 1977, von Hagens developed the ‘plastination’ technique that would go on to make him a multi-millionaire. This process involves replacing the fluids in a corpse with a polymer resin that hardens, conserving an unprecedented level of the fine anatomical structure, and enabling the specimen to be preserved in any position. This ‘plastic taxidermy’ will soon be applied to soft-bodied giant squid in the hope that some insight into their unobserved living form might be gained from the enormous tentacled carcasses that occasionally wash up.
The idea of displaying his human work as art developed in the late 1980’s and culminated with the opening of the Body Worlds exhibition in Japan in 1995. Since then, the exhibition has grossed approximately £45million worldwide, rendering the “is it art?” debate something of a moot point, at least as far as von Hagens is concerned. Having attended the London Body Worlds exhibition, I came away with a feeling not dissimilar to how I imagine your average freak show-going Victorian might have felt after seeing ‘The Incredible Wolf-Faced Boy’: fascinated, but a little bit dirty.
Von Hagen’s status as a science/medical/ Gestapo/media superstar was confirmed in 2002 when in a storm of publicity he conducted the UK’s first public autopsy in 170 years (which was also screened on Channel 4), incurring the wrath of police and medical authorities. The Professor has been no stranger to controversy since. He was fined £96,000 by German authorities for “abuse of an academic title,” having deliberately given the impression that his professorship had been gained in Germany, when in fact it was awarded by a University in north-east China.
A minor indiscretion perhaps, but there is a slightly distasteful flavour to the way von Hagens seems to have created an industry around the post-mortem treatment of bodies. He makes no bones (no pun intended) about the terms he discusses his Body Worlds activities in; indeed, he recently told a BBC journalist about the method behind the madness: “Certainly it’s not dusty old anatomy here - it’s a kind of event anatomy - it’s entertainment.” That view seems to run counter to the motivations that Professor Lee ascribes to himself in his interview with nouse.
From here on in things become a bit more sinister. The Chinese university that awarded the aforementioned professorship now houses the unpleasantly allusive “Von Hagens Plastination Factory.” Added to this, the source of the hundreds of specimens he has plastinated has been repeatedly called into question. A German magazine alleged that some of the bodies were those of Chinese prisoners sentenced to death. Further to this, more specific suspicions have centred on one of von Hagens’ other sources, the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. In an ongoing prosecution, psychiatric hospitals and prisons are accused of ‘stealing’ corpses and illegally selling them to academic institutions, which would in turn supply Heidelberg. While the investigation has found no wrongdoing on von Hagen’s part, his donation of £250,000 to pay for staff and equipment is at best regrettable.
In response, von Hagens has claimed that upwards of 6000 volunteers have come forward to pledge themselves as candidates for plastination. In fact, so inundated has he been that each Body Worlds exhibition now has a volunteer’s day towards the end of its run so people can sign up to be immortalised in plastic. The man himself has made it known that he plans to be plastinated, along with any other members of his family who wish to join him.
The cynical amongst us surely cannot help but suspect that von Hagens very deliberately emphasises his gothic eccentricities. He is certainly more showman than scientist, at least in the sense that we’re unlikely to see him picking up a Nobel Prize anytime soon - more likely a BAFTA. Instead, he has created a character that people are willing to accept as the sort of man who cuts up bodies.
In generating discussion and greater awareness of issues surrounding the treatment of corpses, von Hagens may have performed a potentially valuable function. Channel 4 clearly feels it has hit upon a rich stream of factual programming: their next death-based extravaganza Dust to Dust will feature real decaying human corpses. The worry is that the success of Anatomy for Beginners sets a trend for dressing up spectacle and showmanship as bona-fide scientific broadcasting at a time when real science on TV is struggling for ideas and for viewers.
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