Exhibits of human cadavers preserved in plastic inevitably raise questions for visitors. Is this art? Education or voyeurism? Does it expand spirituality or deny it?
Two Colorado women hope their own bodies will help answer questions both physical and philosophical.
Jessica Jasper, 24, and Davida Knoff, 76, have joined the 11,000 living people worldwide — 42 in Colorado — who are bequeathing their remains to German physician-impresario Gunther von Hagens’ Institute for Plastination, the source of the “Body Worlds” specimens.
For Jasper, the exhibition at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science is at once personal and universal.
“Being raised very fundamentalist, by the time I was a teenager, I wanted to be the antithesis of everything I was raised in,” says Jasper, who grew up in a small Texas panhandle town. “They had already forced the ‘you’re going to hell when you die’ down my throat.”
She rebelled by reading existentialist philosophy during high school pep rallies and dabbling in Buddhism. “I’m not a Christian now. I don’t really have a word to call myself — not atheist, not agnostic. I just exist.”
But Jasper sees her choice to donate her body as its own kind of immortality. Like religious belief for others, her choice gives her a sense of security.
“All I have to do is worry about living. My death is taken care of,” she says.
Why would a 24-year-old even think to worry about planning for her own death?
“I was blown away at how they were able to preserve the bodies. It’s kind of a beautiful thing to be preserved after you die. It’s a beautiful form of artwork, and after I die, I hope it provides the viewer the same experience I had when I saw the exhibit.”
What does her family think?
“They don’t really have a choice to be OK or not OK — — they just have to accept it,” says Jasper. Her mother “was pretty blown away — she was like, ‘You want to do what?’ but my dad was cool about it.”
The plastination program’s oldest Colorado donor, Knoff, says her 54-year-old son doesn’t like to talk about his mom’s plans for the afterlife. Her family thinks it’s “fun,” she says, but “they don’t say ‘Gee golly, Mom has chosen to be plastinated after she dies.’ “
A practical decision
A nurse by training, Knoff wanted to give her body to a medical school but learned that some health conditions made her an unsuitable candidate.
“I didn’t want to be buried. I wasn’t happy about the prospect of cremation,” Knoff says.
“When I saw the first exhibit here, I was enormously fascinated by the complexity of the human body and Dr. von Hagens’ reverence and devotion.”
She wasted no time. “I picked a mortuary out of the yellow pages. I made sure that they understood what was going to happen. The body has to be shipped off as fresh as possible, so to speak,” Knoff says.
For Knoff, her decision is practical rather than spiritual. “Would Jesus want me to do this? Golly gee, I hadn’t thought to e-mail him to see what his opinion is. I don’t believe in any form of organized religion. Some people can imagine spiritual meaning after death, but mine will have medical meaning after death.”
Even after a stint in a rehab hospital for a compression fracture in her spine, Knoff remained focused on the here and now. “I wasn’t even thinking of encroaching mortality. I was just hoping that when I came home, I could manage by myself.”
With the help of her son, she’s back home and using a walker, with a clear picture in her mind of the spinal column in all its intricacy. A passionate advocate for plastination, Knoff’s awe at the process is tempered by a sense of humor.
“Let me just tell you: At my age, my wrinkles have wrinkles, so even if they want to say ‘this is a lack of collagen,’ that’s fine. How marvelous that my body is still of value,” she says.
In an image-saturated society where nothing is left to the imagination, these bodies, stripped of their skin and muscles and their bones exposed, remain as mysterious as the meaning of life (and death) itself.
Dr. Angelina Whalley, von Hagens’ partner in life and in plastination, addressed our culture’s skin-deep perceptions when the exhibit opened.
“We are trained to look at skin,” she said when asked why all the bodies look so physically fit.
So that joke about everybody having a six-pack under their well-padded middles is actually true. Strip away the skin and the fat, and we are all quite similar deep down.
“Once you get to this point, you see how complex we are; that magical feeling expands to the rest of the world, even the universe,” says Jasper, the 24-year-old donor, as she walks through the exhibit.
Holding her hand under the spotlight next to an outstretched plastinated hand in the exhibit, she says, “You see all these elements in the world. You look at a leaf, and it’s like the veins inside us.”
But doesn’t it give her the creeps to think of her own hand, flayed and exposed like the specimens’?
“It’s squirmy no matter how you look at it — but I could be 6 feet underground having worms eating me,” Jasper says.
Like the cadavers used in medical school, the “Body Worlds” specimens are anonymous. But human nature insists on reasserting itself as we struggle with our attitudes toward the dead.
At the University of Colorado School of Medicine, students are taught to view their cadavers as “first patient,” and they hold a memorial service at the end of each academic year to honor the donors and their families.
Physicians assistant student Stacey Britain spoke at the May ceremony: “Dissecting the hands was difficult. Who did these hands hold? What did they produce? Who did they carry?” she said. “I could mentally trace the vessels running through his body, but I did not know the life that once coursed through them.”
It doesn’t cost to give
When someone wants to donate his or her body to science, the State Anatomical Board, housed at the medical school on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, handles the donation.
Like med school donors, “Body Worlds” donors must have died of natural causes, but they can be organ donors before plastination. Neither the anatomical board nor the Institute for Plastination charges a fee for donation.
(“Body Worlds” is not the only exhibitor of preserved cadavers. Lynx Exhibits of El Paso, Texas, staged a Colorado exhibition in 2008 and Premier Exhibitions in Atlanta also presents displays.)
Jacqueline Glover, an associate professor in CU’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities, views “Body Worlds” with an ethicist’s eye.
“It does give me pause to think this is actually human tissue that is part of a piece of art,” she says. “For me personally, that was only somewhat alleviated by knowing the donors knew what they were getting into.”
Kristen Browning-Blas: 303-954-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com
The exhibition
“Body Worlds & the Story of the Heart” is at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science through July 18: dmns.org
• 29 million people have seen the “Body Worlds” exhibitions worldwide. The cadavers in “Body Worlds” come from people who agreed to donate their bodies.
• 11,000 people have willed their bodies to the Institute for Plastination — 42 of them in Colorado. Based in Heidelberg, Germany, it has 580 deceased donors (569 Germans, 11 Americans).
• There is no charge for donating one’s body for plastination. Donors sign consent forms (available at the exhibition), supply a medical history and inform relatives. Age and presence of disease do not disqualify potential donors.
Discussion
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science will hold a discussion on “An Age-Old Question: What Happens When We Die?” at 7 p.m. Tuesday. The museum’s curator of human health, Bridget Coughlin, will pose the questions: “What do you believe happens to you when you die? What is death? Do you believe in a soul that lives on after life in the body is ended?” Admission is $8 for museum members, $10 for nonmembers.
