Inside our insides: Body exhibits continue international exposure

34 photos

Human fascination with the inner workings of our bodies spans our collective history. Luckily, with recent collaborations between the scientific and artistic communities, exhibits featuring authentic, stripped down (as in to the bone) bodies in various poses and levels of dissection have been striving to satiate our curiosity.

While the photos in this collection may be too graphic for some viewers, exhibits from the Human Body Exhibition to Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds promote the inner beauty and anatomical wonders of the human body. Some go as far as scattering assistants and med students around the show floor to answer questions, while others offer viewers a front row seat to an actual organ dissection.

‘Body Worlds’ draws a record attendance
By Edward Gunts, The Baltimore Sun
August 30, 2008

A lively display of dead bodies that ends its seven-month run at the Maryland Science Center on Monday has smashed local museum attendance records to become the most popular traveling exhibit in Baltimore history, drawing more than 300,000 visitors, including a few who were so impressed they’ve offered to donate their bodies for use in the show.

Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds 2: The Original Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, drew 312,258 visitors as of yesterday evening. That was far more than twice the science center’s previous record of 120,000 for a seven-month-long traveling exhibit in 2005 that featured artifacts from the Titanic.

Unlike that exhibit, which benefited from the appeal of the popular movie that preceded it, the Body Worlds show features dissected cadavers posed in various ways to show how the human body works. It has had such a powerful effect on some visitors that they vowed to quit smoking midway through the tour, depositing partly full cigarette packs in a wall-mounted container that has become part of the exhibit.

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