In the last issue of MHR, three authors discussed the exhibit Our Body: The Universe Within. The contributors to this InkLinks continue this conversation.
InkLinks is a regular column in which readers reflect on issues related to the previous article. It is meant to tap the rich intellectual resources that this network provides. We welcome your contribution at leahtamar@comcast.net.
Traveling Bodies and Renaissance Anatomical Theater
A significant conceptual turn took place in the history of human anatomical dissection in Renaissance Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries. During this time, several developments took place within the revival of the humanist tradition that laid the groundwork for the modern practice of anatomical dissection. First, illustrated works on anatomy were written and translated into vernacular languages so that they could be read and understood by people who had not received training in classical languages. Second, anatomical dissections were conducted in either churches or specially built theaters that allowed for banked, circular seating around a center stage where dissections took place. Front rows of seating were normally reserved for medical personnel, but the dissections were also open to the public who were charged an admission fee. These public events were conducted with great ceremony and drama, often bordering on the liturgical or theatrical. Third, in keeping with the Renaissance Humanist ideal of learning from direct experience (rather than learning from an uncritical acceptance of authoritative--but often inaccurate--sources), the anatomist would conduct dissections himself. In the past, medieval professors of anatomy would read from an authoritative text of the time (for example, the work of Galen) while someone else performed dissections for his students. This severance of knowledge and experience prevented the practice of anatomical dissection from fully informing theories of medicine of the time. These first three developments were enmeshed with a fourth; public anatomical dissections came to be seen as a means to acquire self-knowledge (previously known only to the creator of humanity), and to remind people of how fleeting life is (memento mori). The Renaissance artists and anatomical illustrators reflected these developments in their art as they strove to create an aesthetic experience for the viewer/reader out of what was a bloody and violent spectacle. Science, education, art, drama, religion, and public spectacle were comingled in a way not easily teased apart.
Today, exhibits such as Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds and Our Body: The Universe Within can be seen as participating in many of these same themes. The contemporary exhibits are presented as public events that are primarily educational in nature, but that also partake in drama and theatrical presentation. Like anatomical dissections of the past, the exhibits quite literally allow us to look inside other bodies in order to learn and wonder about our own. Human dissections in the Renaissance and our contemporary traveling exhibits also share more shadowy elements such as ethical concerns about how the bodies were obtained, whose bodies they were, lack of reverence for the lives that were lived in those bodies, and the fact that there was/is profit to be made by charging the public for admission.
But there are also some clear and important distinctions to be made between the Renaissance practice of human dissection and today’s traveling exhibits. Two in particular are important to keep in mind. First, the theatrical context for dissections in the Renaissance provided the setting for the primary goal: learning. Today, the inverse seems to be true; traveling bodies are exhibited in an educational context (museums) for a primary purpose that, I would argue, is dramatic entertainment meant to shock and awe crowds of paying visitors. Having spent time at Body Worlds when it opened in Houston, I came away with the impression that the exhibit was primarily intended to entertain by presenting bodies in fantastic poses, and that the primary goal was being presented under the guise of a more noble and acceptable endeavor: anatomical education. Second, dissections in the anatomical theaters of Renaissance Europe took place in real time accompanied by all of the sights, sounds, and smells of dissecting a recently dead human body. This very real sensory participation by the audience in what was happening before their eyes undoubtedly served to educate (and perhaps, shock and awe) the participants in a way that static, posed, plastinated bodies cannot. Much of our contemporary world now consists of plastic--perhaps it’s not surprising that we are flocking to see a discovery that allow us to plastinate the experience of death itself. The progressive distancing of ourselves from the experience of death is perhaps the most profound difference between today’s traveling exhibits of bodies and the Renaissance Europe anatomical theater.
Note: My historical reflections are primarily drawn from: Mary G. Winkler, “The Anatomical Theater” Literature and Medicine 12, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 65-80.
David Kozishek, MA, BCC
Center for Ethics for & Humanities in the Life Sciences
Spectacle and Respect
I missed the recent display of plastinated bodies at the Detroit Science Center that was the subject of thoughtful discussion by Profs. Goldstein, Mongoven, and Waller in the last MHR, although I did see a similar exhibit in London--Body Worlds--in 2002. I walked away with a more vivid appreciation of the Scriptural notion that we are “wonderfully and fearfully made”--but also with the sense that I had been exposed to an upmarket version of an old-time carney side-show--oddly fascinating and vaguely guilt-inducing. Side-shows trouble me because I suspect that responding to people wholly as spectacles is inconsistent with the respect they are owed; a similar concern drove my discomfort in London.
Something in the neighborhood of this worry seems touched on in Prof. Mongoven’s sensitive remarks on humanizing and de-humanizing bodies, but her dominant moral concern seems to be with whether informed consent requirements had been fully complied with, and something similar might be said about Prof. Waller’s fascinating account of the history of human anatomy. Giving consent pride of place seems to me reasonable but ultimately misleading--a point Prof. Goldstein’s claim that “There is no inherently right or wrong way to treat a dead body, except within a particularly cultural setting” helps explain. The connection is this: we worry primarily about informed consent in “Body Worlds” type cases because that’s the only pertinent moral notion that seems rationally defensible--anything else would be like turning mere taboos into categorical imperatives.
Yet informed consent is not a basic moral notion; it is important because it expresses the respect owed to beings of our kind. Nor is consent so straightforwardly applicable here--we are, after all, talking about dead people. So if it makes sense to be concerned that the self-regarding will of a person no longer alive was violated, we seem to have accepted the notion that death doesn’t render a person invulnerable from wrongful disrespect.
This doesn’t worry me much, but we don’t really need to go down this road. All we need do is allow that there’s moral reason to express some kind of attitude of respect to human remains. Here I dissent from Prof. Goldstein’s claim. Consider a culture that treated human bodies--say, the bodies of their poor--with frank contempt, perhaps grinding bones and viscera to make premium kitty litter. Such actions, in my view, would be ethically defective and perhaps just flatly wrong, even if calmly accepted in that culture. Culture does, however, become key when we’re trying to decode the local “idioms” of respect and contempt: if a given culture worshipped cats as gods, human kitty litter might be just fine--but then such use wouldn’t be a sign of contempt.
The questions that displays of plastinated bodies leave with me is whether anyone ought to consent to be so used after death, whether anyone should seek out such consent. Both that such questions are open, and that we tend to neglect them in favor of talk about consent, shows how obscure our own moral resources remain to us--suggesting, perhaps that the deepest lessons we have to learn from these peculiar side-shows is not scientific nor aesthetic, but ethical.
James L. Nelson, Ph.D.
Department of Philosophy