The Bodies Exhibit

I knew this kid when I was growing up, his father was a taxidermist and he stuffed all the family pets when they died. They had five or six stuffed dogs, a couple cats and a turtle. I remember being completely creeped out seeing these glass-eyed former Rovers and Dixies and Buttercups, but now I’m thinking I didn’t appreciate the opportunity for character study.

I mean what the fuck was his father thinking?

Yesterday, we finally went and viewed the Bodies exhibit in Easton here in Columbus. I have heard about this exhibit for years and have wanted to see it since I first heard about cadavers in various stages of dissection being posed dribbling basketballs, writing at desks, and conducting an orchestra. It took us two hours to complete the tour and by the end, I was just numb from viewing body parts. I had seen enough sliced down the middle penises and siloconized vulvas to last me a life time.

A lot of this was stuff I already knew, having spent two years in Pre-Pre-Med as an undergrad (yes, you read that right–I was a science major with emphasis towards Pre-Med before Chemistry 2 bit me in the boo boo and knocked my life for a loop). But there were two factoids that escaped my past study of the human machine and blew my mind yesterday.

  1. Every drop of blood in the body goes through the heart once per minute: This is a bit unnerving to me, thinking of all the blood in my body squirting through my veins and arteries every second so that each drop hits all the chambers of the heart once a minute.
  2. Each human being spends 30 minutes as a single cell before mitosis begins: For some reason, this really puts the conflict of the individual into perspective for me. It seems we spring from this unicellular source and spend the rest of our lives fighting against the constant divisions that upset us each day, trying to get back to that sense of oneness that poets put distance between themselves and it with words and what the true mystics aren’t telling anyone about.

Was the exhibit a bit gross? Not to me but I could see where some people have problems with it. Do I care about the rumors that most of the bodies were supplied via Chinese hard labor prisons? Not really. I like to think that their bodies after death are worth more to our species than they would be rotting away in some prison graveyard in the East somewhere.

All in all, viewing bodies was an enjoyable learning experience that I would recommend.

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