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Perhaps one of the most direct questions that provokes an unequivocal response is, ‘What do you want to happen to your body after you are dead?’ As we know, the main options in the Western economy are burial or
cremation, and the answer ‘I don't know’ or ‘I don't mind’ would be the least typical. In fact, more usually something like ‘I couldn't bear to be put in the ground to rot’ or ‘I couldn't bear to be burnt’ would be the reply. Furthermore, people imply that they know what is at stake by debating the various benefits of their choice. Notwithstanding those individuals who bid for what can be seen to be a socially responsible option, like offering their organs to medical science, the decision about what happens to our bodies after death is largely subjective. Yet one thing that we seem fairly certain about is that, whichever option we might choose, it would be expected that, after the funeral, our body would not become a subject for the public gaze. For relinquishing our corporeality to others for disposal is both veiled in ceremony and constituted as sacred. Thus coffins are designed to shroud, curtains to conceal, and autopsies are medically regulated, serving the prevailing belief that, whatever happens, the dead are to rest in peace. Therefore it is not surprising that, when hoarded body parts of children were recently discovered in a British hospital vault, controversy was bound to follow.
It is within this context that I will ask you to consider the issues that are raised by the extraordinary work of the Anatomy Artist, Gunther von Hagens. For this is a man who trades the dead as his product utilizing the actual cadaver to serve his aesthetic enterprise. Situated as both sculpture and science his exhibits immortalize the dead to stand naked before us, stripped of skin, prised apart with muscles gleaming, their flesh is transposed to banish the vestiges of suffering in an enduring plastic counterpart. So distinct is the protest surrounding Hagens's work tha