Gunther von Hagens answered the question himself: yes, his body will be plastinated. An assent which only confirms his investment in the technique of “plastination”, which he developed in the 1970s. The German anatomist, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease for several years, died on July 24 at the age of 81.
Born in 1945 near Poznań in what is now Poland, he began his medical studies in Jena in 1965. Arrested in 1969 after an attempted flight to the West, he was imprisoned in the GDR, before being “bought” by the Federal Republic in 1970. He then resumed his studies in Lübeck and obtained his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in 1975.
Developed early in his career, plastination made him famous – for better and for worse. A technique for preserving human or animal corpses, it consists of removing water and fat from the tissues, replacing them with silicone or epoxy resin. A complete body can thus be “plastinated” within about a year. At the beginning of the 1990s, Gunther von Hagens systematized the practice by founding the Plastination Institute, a private company currently managed by his wife.
Controversies arose as the anatomist spread his discovery, presenting plastinated bodies throughout the world. The traveling exhibition “Body Worlds” was first held in 1995 in Tokyo, exhibiting entire bodies as well as isolated organs. It then comes to Europe, passing through Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and travels through several German cities between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2010s. It is also shown in several museums in the United States, after the success obtained in Los Angeles in 2004. Despite the opposition of the district to its opening, the Body Worlds Museum was inaugurated in 2015 at Alexanderplatz.
In France, Body Worlds was not presented. In 2009, the courts banned another exhibition of plastinated bodies in Paris, Our Bodyunrelated to Gunther von Hagens. This ban was definitively confirmed by the Court of Cassation in 2010, in the name of respect, dignity and decency due to human remains.
The French philosopher and vice-president of the National Consultative Ethics Committee Pierre Le Coz denounced these practices. In 2004, following an investigation by Der Spiegel on the origin of bodies treated in his establishment in Dalian, von Hagens announced the return to China of seven remains whose origin he could not guarantee and some of which presented suspicious injuries to the skull.
But the man then nicknamed the “doctor of death” always claimed exclusive use of bodies from donors, who had explicitly consented during their lifetime to this treatment of their remains. In 2017, the Plastination Institute identified nearly 22,000 people registered with the donation program. Faced with criticism, its staff still defends the objective of “making anatomy accessible to the general public”and recalls that the “Body Worlds” exhibitions attracted more than 58 million people around the world.
Gunther von Hagens has always claimed the artistic dimension of his work, sometimes referring to the history of art. Rider on his rearing horseone of his most iconic works which assembles a human body with that of a horse, is said to have been inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s bronze sculpture project Horse for a nobleremained unfinished. The educational dimension also appears in The Chess Playerwhich notably highlights the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves.
View of the exhibition “Körperwelten” in 2008.
