Frozen in mid-gait with his left hand hanging by his side, and gaze fixed to his right, a 6-foot-tall man stood before me contemplating mortality. I could see every one of his blood-red flexed muscles, from pedal extremity to braincase, because his entire skin was peeled and dangling in front of his eyes; although, he didn’t seem to mind much. Unprotected and uncovered the internal human body looks rather vulnerable and fragile.
The Skin Man, plastinated in 1997, welcomed me to the Body Worlds 3 exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. The exhibit features more than 200 actual specimens of posed whole human bodies, organs, tissues, circulatory and other body systems, and transparent body slices. Preserved through a process called plastination, the donated bodies have been designed and put on display by the process’s creator, Dr. Gunter von Hagens, and his wife Dr. Angelina Whalley.
“I hope for the exhibition to be places of enlightenment and contemplation, even of philosophical and religious self-recognition,” Dr. von Hagens said in the Body Worlds’ information packet.
It takes a pinch of morbidness to make it through the maze of corpse art sprinkled with body part display cases like some sort of organ jewelry fair.
Completely creepily, my girlfriend was oohing and awing behind me, and grabbed me away from The Skin Man to show me The Archer. I found myself in the line of fire from a post-shot bow held by a skinless woman, except for the ears, eyebrows, lips, nipples and belly-button, kneeling on one leg with the other outstretched, right hand behind her head and on top of which rested the excavated brain.
If von Hagens wanted us to learn about our bodies and how they move, then the posed figures were perfect art to study. However, if he wanted us to learn about our bodies and how our lifestyles and choices affect them, then the real gems were the preserved organs and transparent body slices. Through a process called comparative anatomy. Whalley placed diseased organs next to healthy organs to basically scare the crap out of each onlooker, and hopefully be the catalyst for change.
A blackened set of smoker’s lungs sat shriveled up like old charred meat in contrast to the healthy peachy skin colored non-smoker’s lungs next to them. A sign states that smoking 20 cigarettes a day means five ounces, a full coffee cup, of tar a year will be deposited in the lungs. Ten steps away a clear plastic bin is half-full of cigarette packs and promise cards signed by people who pledge to give up smoking.
“Gross, why’s it not full?” my girlfriend asked.
“You should send one of those cards every day to your sister until she quits,” I responded.
“She came here and saw the lungs already, but couldn’t look at them really. She’ll never quit anyway, and will just get mad if I send her a pledge card,” she said.
Past a pair of staged skinless acrobats and a full view of an arthritic knee next to a knee replacement surgery I came face to face with my demon – alcohol. Taunting me was a healthy liver that was smooth, round and deep red like a fresh cut of steak. I wasn’t sure if someone had snuck off with my liver when I wasn’t paying attention, but the displayed cirrhosis liver sure felt like mine. The crumpled up ball of scars looked like a small, rough lava rock.
Alcoholic cirrhosis develops in 15 percent of people who drink heavily for more than a decade, and “heavily” can mean as little as 3-4 drinks a day for men and 2-3 drinks a day for women. Cirrhosis kills 26,000 people each year, and it is the 12th leading cause of death by disease.
It was my 28th birthday that day, and unlike my girlfriend’s sister, I decided to take a hard long look at what was in front of me – my future. I didn’t drink on my birthday for the first time in seven years.
Down a staircase I found a room with something I hadn’t seen yet: a horizontal body slice. Obesity killed the man whose body I was looking at. He was a little less than six feet tall and weighed more than 300 pounds. The pale white curd had infiltrated his organs, his circulatory system and even around his jaw. The thick, insulated body was an arresting vision in comparison to the tawny muscular bodies I had looked at on display for the last hour.
I knew my girlfriend’s sister’s reaction at the blackened lungs, and mine at the shriveled liver, but I wanted to know if an obese person would walk by and listen to this man’s cry for help.
Eventually a large woman, perhaps 5 foot 7 inches and 260-280 pounds and a man 6 foot 3 inches and 200 pounds, stopped across the display from me. She wore a white sundress with large black flowers on it that swished behind her like a horse’s tail when she walked. Her cheeks steady like stone and the corners of her mouth motionless, but her eyes eventually gave her away. Her pupils enlarged as she scanned the obesity victim’s body and read how he died, then her nose flared and she took a sharp breath in like someone does right before they’re about to cry. Just when I thought a lifestyle change and perhaps a longer life were going to win out, she said to her husband, “I’m tired, and my back hurts, let’s hurry up and get out of here.”
Although von Hagens spends his life teaching people about their bodies and their lifestyles in hopes of changing what is unhealthy and cancerous, it seems The Skin Man and all of us contemplating our own mortality have three options: Realize our situation but deny change for a better life, come to grips with our situation and evolve by growing away from our vices, or pretend we don’t see death or any other problem staring us in the face and complain some more.