What a piece of work is a man

At the moment, we have a Czech medical student staying with us for six weeks. He is 24 and has done five years of a six-year medicine degree at the University of Prague. He is spending six weeks with us while he works at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in central London. It’s great to have him with us because he and his famliy have been really close friends for almost two decades.
We went together to Earls Court in central London to see a remarkable exhibition called simply “Bodies”. This is the creation of an American institution, although all the human bodies look oriental.
Once dissected, the specimen is immersed in acetone, which eliminates all body water. The specimen is then placed in a large bath of silicone, or polymer, and sealed in a vacuum chamber. Under vacuum, acetone leaves the body in the form of gas and the polymer replaces it, entering each cell and body tissue. A catalyst is then applied to the specimen, hardening it and completing the process.
The exhibition is enormously educational, showing all the parts and functions of the human body and demonstrating its immense complexity. There is a display of the blackened lungs of a heavy smoker that should put tobacco users off. Not an exhibition for the squeamish though.
A few years ago, I saw a very similar exhibition in London called “Body Worlds” put on by Gunther von Hagens. His bodies looked oriental too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 7:04 am and is filed under Science & technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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