Body Worlds Exhibit Essay

The body worlds exhibit is a traveling exhibition of conserved human bodies and human parts they have prepared by plastination. Plastination is when the water and fat inside the body is replaced with plastic so that human specimens can be touched, do not smell, or decay. The creator of plastination was German his name was, Dr. Gunther Von Hugens. The three main reasons why body worlds exhibits are a good and bad idea to have around the world are, educational but disturbing, artistic but odd, and can help with medicine and patients but can sometimes be personal. To begin, body world exhibits should exist because, they are educational. They give you a visual imagery on your whole body three dimensional using real human bodies. Young students training to be in the medical field could relate to these exhibits and learn a lot, like where your organs are placed, which muscles flex when you move a certain muscle, what it looks like to have smoker’s lungs and not have smoker’s lungs, you could learn many things by going to these exhibits and just examine the bodies. One of the bad reasons why body world exhibits should not exist is because, they can be disturbing. For some cutting up and cleaning out the inside of a dead human body and have it prepared for plastination might just be a bit too extreme. To continue, body world exhibits should exist because, it is artistic. Some of the human bodies are placed in different shapes and forms. For example, there is a human body faced upside down with a skateboard in hand doing a trick it is showing the different kinds of movement in your muscles. Some bodies just have nerves covering their entire body, there are 8th month old fetus’s, and two placsinated bodies meshed together. To make these exhibits interesting you would have to be very creative and artistic. Another bad reason why body world exhibits should not exist is because, their odd. Who would want to go pay $30 for an exhibit that shows thousands of dead people carved out into presentable form so you can see their insides? They were alive just like you a few years ago, and now their a mannequins posing for people to take pictures and jot down notes? You would either have to be artistic, smart, or brave to walk around with plastic corpses.