When a body meets a body…

If you’re feeling dead on your feet due to the downturn (or as it’s portrayed on the radio – the Apocalypse/Armageddon/Financial judgement day) it’s time to put it all into perspective. And nothing puts death into perspective like a few rooms full of bona fide corpses.

Bodies opened at the weekend in the Ambassador, showcasing a range of cadavers turned into waxwork-like figures through a process called plastination. The process was developed by Mr Live Autopsy himself, the crazy German in the black hat, Prof Gunther von Hagens, but refined by American Dr Roy Glover, who curated this macabre show.

The show has hefted along with it plenty of controversy. The bodies used in the exhibition are of unknown provenance. The website states that “All of the bodies were obtained through the Dalian Medical University Plastination Laboratories in the People’s Republic of China.” Glover said that he is happy that the bodies are ethically sourced, and, to be fair, a lot of the controversy could be an inheritance from Prof von Hagens, who had to return bodies to China in 2004 after bullet holes were discovered in their skulls.

Regardless, this is a stunning show. The techniques used to preserve the bodies are clearly highly advanced and the result is a natural spectacle. Entire cadavers, with everything stripped away bar the blood vessels. Bodies dissected in all manner of tranches, vertical slices, horizontal MRI-like slivers, and with muscles ‘exploded’ from their points of origin to show how they work.

The spin put on the show to counter the controversy is that it is an educational exhibition, and that’s fair enough. Tidbits of information are dropped all around the exhibition space, organs with cancer and tuberculosis and the lungs of smokers (with a deposit box for cigarette boxes) sit beside clear white non-smokers’ lungs.  The show will open your eyes to what goes on below your skin, and even the most squeamish will find this scintillating. (I went along with my squeamish girlfriend – she kept dinner inside her insides, thankfully).

I spoke about it on Phantom FM’s The Kiosk on Saturday morning, hosted by Nadine O’Regan and ably assisted by fellow panelists/researchers Patrick Freyne and Johnnie Craig. It got five stars from me then, and it gets five stars from me now. Go see.