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Gunther von Hagens (born Gunther Gerhard Liebchen; 10 January 1945) is a German anatomist, businessman and lecturer. He developed the technique for preserving biological tissue specimens called plastination. Von Hagens has organized numerous Body Worlds public exhibitions and occasional live demonstrations of his and his colleagues' work, and has traveled worldwide to promote its educational value. The sourcing of biological specimens for and the commercial background of his exhibits has been controversial.[3][4]
Hagens was born Gunther Gerhard Liebchen in Alt-Skalden (now called Skalmierzyce) near Ostrowo, Reichsgau Wartheland, in German-annexed Poland. When he was five days old, his parents took him on a six-month trek westwards, to escape from the advancing Red Army and the imminent Soviet occupation. The family lived briefly in Berlin and its vicinity, before finally settling in Greiz, a small town which was allocated to the Soviet occupation zone, so that Hagens grew up in East Germany. He lived in Greiz until the age of nineteen.
A haemophiliac, as a child Hagens spent six months in hospital after being injured. This stimulated an interest in medical science, and in 1965 he began to study medicine at the University of Jena. While there, he began to question Communism and Socialism, and widened his knowledge of politics by gathering information from non-communist news sources. He participated in student protests against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. In January 1969, disguised as a vacationing student, he made his way across Bulgaria and Hungary, and on 8 January attempted to cross the Czechoslovakian border into Austria. He failed, but made a second attempt the next day, at another location along the border.[5] He was arrested and punished with two years in jail.[6]
Hagens escaped to West Germany in 1970.[7] He continued his medical studies in Lübeck and received a doctorate in 1975 from the University of Heidelberg. When he married his first wife, he changed his surname from Liebchen to that of his wife, "von Hagens".[8]
Career
Hagens is best known for his plastination technique, which he invented and patented between 1977 and 1982.[9][10] In 1982, Hagens was appointed as a lecturer in the Institutes of Anatomy and Pathology at the University of Heidelberg, and in 1993 he founded the Institute of Plastination in Heidelberg. By 2004, he had been in the city for 22 years.[11] In 1996 he became a visiting professor at Dalian in China, where he runs a second plastination institute, and he also directs a plastination center at the State Medical Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.[12] Since 2004, Hagens has also been a guest professor at the New York University College of Dentistry.[12]
Gunther Von Hagens Cologne 2000
In its first twenty years, plastination was used to preserve small specimens of tissue for medical study. It was not until the early 1990s that equipment was developed to make it possible to plastinate whole body specimens, each specimen taking up to 1,500 hours of work to prepare.[13] The first exhibition of whole plastinated bodies took place in Japan in 1995. Over the next two years, Hagens developed his first Body Worlds exhibition, showing whole bodies plastinated in lifelike poses and dissected to show various structures and systems of human anatomy, and these have since met with public interest and controversy in more than fifty cities around the world. The exhibition, and Hagens' subsequent exhibitions Body Worlds 2, 3 and 4, had received more than 26million visitors all over the world as of 2008[update].[14]
To produce specimens for a Body Worlds exhibition, Hagens employs 340 people at five laboratories in four different countries. Each laboratory is categorized by speciality, with the laboratory in China focusing on animal specimens. The plastinated giraffe which appeared in Body Worlds 3 & The Story of the Heart was one of the most difficult specimens to create, [15] taking a total of three years–ten times longer than it takes to prepare a human body. Ten people were required to move the giraffe, because its final weight, like all specimens after plastination, was equal to its original weight.[citation needed]
The Body Worlds exhibits were featured in a supposed Miami exhibition in the 2006 film Casino Royale, although the actual location for the exterior shots was the Ministry of Transport in Prague. Hagens himself makes a cameo appearance in the film and can be seen leading a tour past where James Bond kills a villain.[citation needed]
Hagens has developed new body sectioning methods that yield very thin slices, which can then be plastinated and used for anatomical studies. He is also developing similar techniques for specimens as large as elephants. He works in a concealed laboratory, with an entrance behind a movable staircase, where he developed his wafer plastination techniques.[16][17]
Controversy
Religious groups, including representatives of the Roman Catholic Church[18] and some rabbis, have objected to the display of human remains, stating that it is inconsistent with reverence towards the human body.
In 2002 Hagens performed the first public autopsy to take place in the United Kingdom in 170 years, before a sell-out audience of 500 people in a London theatre.[19] Prior to performing the autopsy, he had received a letter from Her Majesty's Inspector of Anatomy, the British government official responsible for regulating the educational use of cadavers. The letter warned Hagens that performing a public autopsy would be a criminal act under section 11 of the Anatomy Act 1984. The show was attended by officers from the Metropolitan Police, but they did not intervene, and the dissection was performed in full. The autopsy was shown in November 2002 on the British Channel 4 television channel; it resulted in over 130 complaints, an OFCOM record, but the Independent Television Commission ruled that the programme had not been sensationalist and had not broken broadcasting rules.[20]
In 2003, the television production company Mentorn proposed a documentary called Futurehuman, in which Hagens would perform a series of modifications on a corpse to demonstrate "improvements" to human anatomy. Controversy was sparked when the company, with Hagens, appealed publicly for a terminally ill person to donate his body for the project. A donor was found, but the documentary was cancelled after the body donor pulled out.[21]
In February 2004, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung confirmed earlier reports by the German TV station ARD that Hagens had offered a one-time payment and a lifelong pension to Alexander Sizonenko if he would agree to have his body transferred to the Institute of Plastination after his death. Sizonenko, reported to be one of the world's tallest men at 2.48m (8ft 2in), had played basketball for the Soviet Union and was later plagued by numerous health problems until his death in 2012. He declined the offer.[22]
After several legal challenges to the Body Worlds exhibition in Germany, in the Summer of 2004 Hagens announced that it would be leaving the country. From 2004 onwards, the exhibitions toured North America, returning to Europe in 2007 with an exhibition in Manchester, England, and ending in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2011.[23] Starting in 2009, Hagens also exhibited in Germany again and opened permanent exhibits in Berlin in 2015 and in Heidelberg in 2017.
Hagens has accepted bodies into his collection whose origins he could not verify.[24] Hagens stored 647 bodies at his business in Liaoning province, China. Two bodies with bullet holes in their skulls were sourced from Dalian University and some have speculated that these bodies could have been executed prisoners.[25]
Legal accusations
In 2002 there were legal proceedings against a senior pathologist and coroner in Siberia regarding a shipment of 56 corpses to Heidelberg. The police maintained that the Novosibirsk coroner, Vladimir Novosylov, had sold the bodies illegally to buyers outside of Russia. Hagens was not charged in the case, but he was called as a witness against Novosylov.[26] The authorities stopped the shipment of bodies and the agreement between Novosibirsk and Hagens was terminated.[27]
In October 2003, a parliamentary committee in Kyrgyzstan investigated accusations that Hagens had illegally received and plastinated several hundred corpses from prisons, psychiatric institutions and hospitals in Kyrgyzstan, some without prior notification of the families. Hagens himself testified to the committee; he said he had received nine corpses from Kyrgyzstan hospitals, that none of them had been used for the Body Worlds exhibition, and that he was neither involved with nor responsible for the notification of the families.[28]
In 2003, an animal rights organization filed a complaint alleging that Hagens did not have correct papers for a gorilla he had plastinated.[29] He had received the cadaver from the Hanover Zoo, where the animal had died.[29]
In 2003, the University of Heidelberg filed a criminal complaint against Hagens, claiming that he had misrepresented himself as a professor from a German university in a Chinese document, and that in Germany he had failed to state the foreign origin of his title. After a trial, he received a fine in March 2004. On 25 April 2005, a Heidelberg court imposed a fine of €108,000 (equivalent to a prison term of 90 days at the daily income assessed by the court) for one count of using an academic title that he was not entitled to, but acquitted him on four other counts. On appeal, a higher court in September 2006 reduced the penalty to a warning with a suspended fine of €50,000, which under German law is not deemed a prior criminal conviction.[30] In 2007 the charge of title misuse was finally dismissed by the Federal Court of Justice of Germany in Karlsruhe.[31]
German prosecutors declined to press charges, and in March 2005 Hagens was granted an interim injunction against Der Spiegel, preventing the magazine from claiming that Body Worlds contained the bodies of executed prisoners.[28]
Personal life
Hagens describes himself as an agnostic, believing that the human mind is not constructed to answer such a question as the existence of God, and he instead puts all his faith into the human body.[32][33]
Hagens is married to Angelina Whalley, the creative director of the Body Worlds exhibitions.[1] He has three children from his first marriage and also retains his first wife’s surname, "von Hagens".[8] When appearing in public, even when performing anatomical dissections, Hagens always wears a black fedora (a reference to the hat worn in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt).[34]
Hagens has said that his grand goal is the founding of a "Museum of Man", where exhibits of human anatomy can be shown permanently. He once commented that after death he planned to donate plastinated wafers of his own body to several universities, so that in death he can (physically) teach at several locations, something he cannot do while alive.[16] However, he later changed his mind about this.[35]
In January 2011, Hagens announced that he was suffering from Parkinson's disease and that after his death his wife would plastinate his body and put his preserved corpse on display as part of the Body Worlds exhibitions.[36] In October 2018, before the opening of a Body Worlds exhibition in London to put plastinated human body parts on permanent display, Hagens said he wanted his own remains one day to be posed in the entrance, with his hand outstretched to greet visitors.[35]
Television appearances
In 2005, Channel 4 screened four programmes entitled Anatomy for Beginners, featuring Gunther von Hagens and the pathology professor John Lee dissecting a number of cadavers and discussing the structure and function of many of the body's parts.[37]
A four-part follow-up series entitled Autopsy: Life and Death was aired on Channel 4 in 2006, in which Hagens and Lee discussed common fatal diseases (circulatory issues, cancer, poisoning from organ failure, and ageing) with the aid of dissections.[38]
He made a guest appearance in an episode of the 2004 BBC series Regency House Party.
In November 2007, another series of three television programmes was broadcast entitled Autopsy: Emergency Room,[39] showing what happens when the body is injured, and featuring presentations by the British Red Cross.[40]
Related Research Articles
The history of anatomy extends from the earliest examinations of sacrificial victims to the sophisticated analyses of the body performed by modern anatomists and scientists. Written descriptions of human organs and parts can be traced back thousands of years to ancient Egyptian papyri, where attention to the body was necessitated by their highly elaborate burial practices.
The Nibelungenlied, translated as The Song of the Nibelungs, is an epic poem written around 1200 in Middle High German. Its anonymous poet was likely from the region of Passau. The Nibelungenlied is based on an oral tradition of Germanic heroic legend that has some of its origin in historic events and individuals of the 5th and 6th centuries and that spread throughout almost all of Germanic-speaking Europe. Scandinavian parallels to the German poem are found especially in the heroic lays of the Poetic Edda and in the Völsunga saga.
Body Worlds is a traveling exposition of dissected human bodies, animals, and other anatomical structures of the body that have been preserved through the process of plastination. Gunther von Hagens developed the preservation process which "unite[s] subtle anatomy and modern polymer chemistry", in the late 1970s.
Decomposition or rot is the process by which dead organic substances are broken down into simpler organic or inorganic matter such as carbon dioxide, water, simple sugars and mineral salts. The process is a part of the nutrient cycle and is essential for recycling the finite matter that occupies physical space in the biosphere. Bodies of living organisms begin to decompose shortly after death. Animals, such as earthworms, also help decompose the organic materials. Organisms that do this are known as decomposers or detritivores. Although no two organisms decompose in the same way, they all undergo the same sequential stages of decomposition. The science which studies decomposition is generally referred to as taphonomy from the Greek word taphos, meaning tomb. Decomposition can also be a gradual process for organisms that have extended periods of dormancy.
Plastination is a technique or process used in anatomy to preserve bodies or body parts, first developed by Gunther von Hagens in 1977. The water and fat are replaced by certain plastics, yielding specimens that can be touched, do not smell or decay, and even retain most properties of the original sample.
The Visible Human Project is an effort to create a detailed data set of cross-sectional photographs of the human body, in order to facilitate anatomy visualization applications. It is used as a tool for the progression of medical findings, in which these findings link anatomy to its audiences. A male and a female cadaver were cut into thin slices, which were then photographed and digitized. The project is run by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) under the direction of Michael J. Ackerman. Planning began in 1986; the data set of the male was completed in November 1994 and the one of the female in November 1995. The project can be viewed today at the NLM in Bethesda, Maryland. There are currently efforts to repeat this project with higher resolution images but only with parts of the body instead of a cadaver.
Disposal of human corpses, also called final disposition, is the practice and process of dealing with the remains of a deceased human being. Disposal methods may need to account for the fact that soft tissue will decompose relatively rapidly, while the skeleton will remain intact for thousands of years under certain conditions.
A prosector is a person with the special task of preparing a dissection for demonstration, usually in medical schools or hospitals. Many important anatomists began their careers as prosectors working for lecturers and demonstrators in anatomy and pathology.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a 1632 oil painting on canvas by Rembrandt housed in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, the Netherlands. It was originally created to be displayed by the Surgeons Guild in their meeting room. The painting is regarded as one of Rembrandt's early masterpieces.
August Hirt was an anatomist with Swiss and German nationality who served as a chairman at the Reich University in Strasbourg during World War II. He performed experiments with mustard gas on inmates at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and played a leading role in the murders of 86 people at Natzweiler-Struthof for the Jewish skull collection. The skeletons of his victims were meant to become specimens at the Institute of anatomy in Strasbourg, but completion of the project was stopped by the progress of the war. He was an SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) and in 1944, an SS-Sturmbannführer (major).
John Andre Lee is a retired English pathologist who was formerly clinical professor of pathology at Hull York Medical School and consultant histopathologist at Rotherham General Hospital, later becoming the Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust's Director of Cancer Services. Lee gained a BSc and a PhD in physiology at University College London, and then a medical degree subsequently specialising in pathology.
Mos Teutonicus was a postmortem funerary custom used in Europe in the Middle Ages as a means of transporting, and solemnly disposing of, the bodies of high-status individuals. Nobles would often undergo Mos Teutonicus since their burial plots were often located far away from their place of death. The process involved the removal of the flesh from the body, so that the bones of the deceased could be transported hygienically from distant lands back home.
The Mauer 1 mandible is the oldest-known specimen of the genus Homo in Germany. It was found in 1907 in a sand quarry in the community Mauer, around 10 km (6.2 mi) south-east of Heidelberg. The Mauer 1 mandible is the type specimen of the species Homo heidelbergensis. Some European researchers have classified the find as Homo erectus heidelbergensis, regarding it as a subspecies of Homo erectus. In 2010 the mandible's age was for the first time exactly determined to be 609,000 ± 40,000 years. Previously, specialist literature had referred to an age of either 600,000 or 500,000 years on the basis of less accurate dating methods.
Bodies: The Exhibition is an exhibition showcasing human bodies that have been preserved through a process called plastination and dissected to display bodily systems. It opened in Tampa, Florida on August 20, 2005. It is similar to, though not affiliated with, the exhibition Body Worlds. The exhibit displays internal organs and organic systems, bodies staged in active poses, and fetuses in various stages of development.
A cadaver or corpse is a dead human body. Cadavers are used by medical students, physicians and other scientists to study anatomy, identify disease sites, determine causes of death, and provide tissue to repair a defect in a living human being. Students in medical school study and dissect cadavers as a part of their education. Others who study cadavers include archaeologists and arts students. In addition, a cadaver may be used in the development and evaluation of surgical instruments.
Skalmierzyce is an urbanized village in Ostrów Wielkopolski County, Greater Poland Voivodeship, in west-central Poland. It lies approximately 20 kilometres (12 mi) east of Ostrów Wielkopolski and 106 km (66 mi) south-east of the regional capital Poznań. It adjoins the town of Nowe Skalmierzyce.
Anatomy for Beginners is a television show created by Gunther von Hagens.
A prosection is the dissection of a cadaver or part of a cadaver by an experienced anatomist in order to demonstrate for students anatomic structure. In a dissection, students learn by doing; in a prosection, students learn by either observing a dissection being performed by an experienced anatomist or examining a specimen that has already been dissected by an experienced anatomist.
An anatomy murder is a murder committed in order to use all or part of the cadaver for medical research or teaching. It is not a medicine murder because the body parts are not believed to have any medicinal use in themselves. The motive for the murder is created by the demand for cadavers for dissection, and the opportunity to learn anatomy and physiology as a result of the dissection. Rumors concerning the prevalence of anatomy murders are associated with the rise in demand for cadavers in research and teaching produced by the Scientific Revolution. During the 19th century, the sensational serial murders associated with Burke and Hare and the London Burkers led to legislation which provided scientists and medical schools with legal ways of obtaining cadavers. Rumors persist that anatomy murders are carried out wherever there is a high demand for cadavers. These rumors, like those concerning organ theft, are hard to substantiate, and may reflect continued, deep-held fears of the use of cadavers as commodities.
The conservation and restoration of human remains involves the long-term preservation and care of human remains in various forms which exist within museum collections. This category can include bones and soft tissues as well as ashes, hair, and teeth. Given the organic nature of the human body, special steps must be taken to halt the deterioration process and maintain the integrity of the remains in their current state. These types of museum artifacts have great merit as tools for education and scientific research, yet also have unique challenges from a cultural and ethical standpoint. Conservation of human remains within museum collections is most often undertaken by a conservator-restorer or archaeologist. Other specialists related to this area of conservation include osteologists and taxidermists.
1 2 Tilly Gambarotto, Terminally ill ‘Dr Death’ Gunther von Hagens wants his corpse displayed in exhibition of dissected human bodies], The Independent, 5 October 2018, accessed 13 July 2022
Whalley, Angelina; Josef Wetz, Franz (2005). Der Grenzgänger: Begegnungen mit Gunther von Hagens (in German). Heidelberg: Arts & Sciences. ISBN3-937256-01-6. OCLC70873993.
Wetz, Franz Josef; Tag, Brigitte (2001). Schöne neue Körperwelten: der Streit um die Ausstellung (in German). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ISBN3-608-94311-0. OCLC47118365.
da Fonseca, Liselotte Hermes (1999). "Wachsfigur-Mensch-Plastinat. Uber die Mitteilbarkeit von Sehen, Nennen und Wissen". Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (in German). 73 (1): 43–68. doi:10.1007/BF03375605. ISSN0012-0936. S2CID171265321.
Kleinschmidt, Nina; Wagner, Henri (2000). Endlich unsterblich?: Gunther von Hagens – Schöpfer der Körperwelten (in German). Lübbe. ISBN3-404-60493-8. OCLC47712310.
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