'Bodies...The Exhibition' features real cadavers
By Eric Mungenast, Staff Writer
November 9, 2007 | 5 p.m.
Friday afternoon at Easton Town Center in Columbus featured many shoppers aimlessly drifting from shop to shop, searching for that one item they could not find. Nestled away from the Friday mall malaise, within the empty husk of a CompUSA, resides the much talked about “Bodies...The Exhibition.”
The exhibit was a mild surprise as far as content was concerned. Instead of an artistic expression of the human body, the exhibit was a glimpse into the future, showing the newest way to teach the human anatomy. Even the walls were educational, with factoids like, “Bones store the calcium and phosphorous necessary for their own strength and flexibility and for proper nerve and muscle function,” and “The largest muscles in the body are those in the buttocks.”
The exhibit split into several rooms, each with its own segment of the anatomy. One room focused entirely on the brain, another on the circulatory system. Every room, however, contained at least one preserved body, or at least the majority of the body, sealed in a plastic casing. According to the exhibit’s Web site, the specimen, after dissection, was dipped in a silicone bath and sealed in vacuum chamber. After that, a catalyst was applied to the body to harden it. The process, in the end, rendered the body in its most bashful state, stripped down to the barest of essentials and scrutinized thoroughly by the audience. The bodies literally hid nothing, including the genitalia, which ranged in size depending on the individual.
“Overall, [the exhibit’s] fairly informative and it makes you appreciate what your body does on a day-to-day basis,” said Ian Gruber, a senior medical student at Ohio State University.
The muscles look similar to a chicken leg, a fact that Mitchel Talbot, a sophomore wildlife conservation major at Ohio University, noted when he first saw a version of the exhibit at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland two years ago.
“[The exhibit] looks like overdone chicken,” Talbot said. The Columbus exhibit and the Cleveland version were quite different, he said, as the Cleveland version was longer and contained more information.
“This was more casual, more of a walk-through,” Talbot said.
One of the more interesting parts of the exhibit was how short the bodies were, which allowed the curious attendee to peer into the lifeless, usually brown, eyes of the bodies. The eyes portrayed the stereotypical thousand-mile stare, looking at something far beyond the scope of the living.
Unfortunately, parts of the exhibit crossed the line between educational and moral, particularly the part focusing on the lungs. Next to a lung blackened to a crisp by cancer was a clear box with a slit in it and a sign that read, “On average, a pack of cigarettes takes two hours and twenty minutes off your life. We’d like you to be around longer. Leave your cigarettes here and stop smoking now.” The box contained 14 full packs of cigarettes and two empty packs.
Richard Berg, a resident of Worthington, Ohio, and a 2006 graduate of OU, went to see the exhibit because of a family visit and general curiosity.
“Normally, donating blood makes me sick to my stomach,” Berg said. “This [exhibit] didn’t make me feel that. I was more curious than anything,”
Berg said the part of the exhibit that focused on the ear interested his wife, who is a speech therapist, and “put everything in perspective” for her.
Some parts of the exhibit were a bit graphic, as one man warned a pregnant guest that she “might have a problem further on” with the upcoming parts of the exhibit. Besides the aforementioned lung cancer, the exhibit had a whale intestine, a testicle with testicular cancer and a brain that suffered from a stroke.
However, the most contentious section was one of the later sections that involved fetuses. Preserved fetuses from 28 weeks, 12 weeks and nine weeks almost unwittingly created controversy concerning the permanently topical abortion debate. The actual size of the fetus at the 28-week mark, the conceded “viability” mark for abortion in the United States, was much larger than imagined. Fetuses with cleft lip and spina bifida were particularly gruesome and heart wrenching.
The end of the exhibition featured a gift shop, complete with over-priced scrubs and socks with all the bones of the foot. The lack of patrons at the exhibit was a little odd, although the timing of the visit had an effect on the business. Morning is the busiest time for the exhibit, normally with two to six school groups, each with about a hundred students, according to the staff.
The exhibit will be in Columbus until Dec. 31. Tickets are just $15 for students with identification, a bargain for such an interesting exhibit that, in the end, is worth a trip to Easton and a jaunt to Chipotle.
---