The Anatomists

Dr Colin Stolkin, anatomist at Guy's Hospital, gives his opinion on Gunter von Hagens and Body Worlds:

Gunther von Hagens is in the tradition of the great anatomists and the great publicisers of anatomy. The skill and intricacy of the work is amazing. It takes a long time to be able to absorb the vast amount of information that's been conveyed by one of his dissections. One seldom sees dissection of that level of detail, and certainly not with the numbers of specimens that are available in this exhibition. So it's a treasure-trove for any anatomist to explore.

This is not just an art exhibition. There is obviously great artistic skill and craft here, but this is also an educational, a scientific exhibition of the human body. Certainly, seeing a body dissected is very different from seeing a piece of sculpture in an exhibition. But the public has as much right to see this as medical students. And, in the past, the public has always seen this: for the greater part of the history of anatomy, the public has had access to human dissection.

I think it's a very good thing that people are coming to an exhibition like this, coming with their friends, with their family, with their children, and are looking at dissections and at corpses. I think our society is unique, given the power of modern medicine, in that we've all been isolated from death for a long, long time. Obviously it's a very good thing that people live longer and we live more fulfilling lives, but there is a danger that death is something that is dismissed from our minds and is never really faced. That attitude that we are invincible, that we are going to live forever, cannot be a healthy approach to life.

What von Hagens does is not an advance in human knowledge or understanding of how the body works or how it is built, but it is an advance in communication, an advance in education. It's a way of presenting things in a new way, which is a very, very important aspect of scholarship. Here we have a three-dimensional representation; you move round it, you look inside it, and that is a very different experience from a computer.

Gunther von Hagens stands out as a giant in the great tradition that starts with Leonardo and Vesalius and moves on through John Hunter. I can't say whether he's one of the greatest, but he is great, and is very important.