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Professor Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds exhibition is hugely popular. It has been seen by more than eight million people in Germany, Japan, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland. Yet it arouses strong feelings, of disgust and fascination, but also of outrage. Rumours about where exactly von Hagens gets his bodies abound. It is known that all the bodies exhibited whole have been donated, but the exact origins of the 200 body parts are not known. Von Hagens himself believes that it is not necessary to have consent for the use of body parts in every case. Some visitors to the Body Worlds exhibition feel that the artist is exploiting the dead, stripping them of their dignity posthumously. The strong feelings that von Hagens' exhibition – and his multi-million dollar business selling anatomical specimens to institutions – provoke, are typical of our somewhat mixed feelings about how a body should be treated after death. • Cultural and religious perspective Cultural and religious perspectiveSome religions – including Orthodox Judaism – forbid desecration of a
body after death. Many cultures hold that in order for the soul to find
peace, the body should be interred intact; others believe that the body
has to be cremated to release the soul. Ethics of the early anatomists
The ethics of the anatomist have been questioned for as long as the workings of the human body have been studied. Indeed, the history of anatomical studies is littered with stories of bodysnatching, torture and murder. The very first anatomists, working in Alexandria in the third century BC, carried out dissections of the dead, but also of the living: criminals were used for vivisection. In 18th century Britain, anatomists paid gangs to steal bodies from graveyards, and in one extreme case – that of Burke and Hare – anatomists accepted bodies that had been murdered specifically with the intention of selling them to surgeons. The Anatomy ActThe outcry over Burke and Hare led in 1832 to the passage by Parliament of the Anatomy Act. This stipulated that the bodies of those maintained by the state – the very poor who lived in workhouses – became the property of the anatomists after death, so long as they were not claimed by a relative within 48 hours. An Inspector of Anatomy, working for the Home Office, was appointed to administer the act. The 1832 Act revoked the provision by which executed murderers would be made available for dissection. It did include a provision for people who left a request in writing that their body not to be dissected. However, since few poor people were aware of the detail of the law, most did not make this request. The Anatomy Act was deeply unpopular, since it blatantly discriminated against the poor, yet it remained in force almost unchanged until recently. As workhouses became less and less numerous, the supply of bodies available to anatomists declined. In the 1920s, the Inspector of Anatomy ruled that bodies from mental asylums should be made available to anatomists, in return for a fee to the institutions' officials. The problems of where to get hold of bodies began to lessen between the wars. As religious attitudes softened, so the number of bodies left to science rose. Before the First World War, there were almost no bequests of bodies at all, but by the end of the Second World War, almost all of the bodies used by anatomists had been donated. Who does your body belong to?The Anatomy Act did clearly establish to whom a dead body belongs. Until relatively recently, the principle that the 'only lawful possessor of the dead body is the earth' prevailed in the UK. In centuries past, this meant that grave robbers could not in fact be prosecuted for stealing a body – it was not deemed the property of anyone. However, if the robbers stole something interred with the body – such as a shroud or piece of jewellery – they were then liable to prosecution. Today, lawful possession of a dead body usually goes to the next of kin, who may give consent for the body to be harvested for organs. Even if, in life, you have bequeathed your body to science, consent must be obtained from a relative before the body can be used for research or dissection. Breaking the law: Anthony Noel Kelly
The problem of the ownership of dead bodies was thrown into stark relief by the case of Anthony Noel Kelly, the artist who 'stole' body parts from the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS). Since the body parts taken were unidentifiable, it was difficult to establish whether Kelly was in fact guilty of theft. The judge in Kelly's case decided that the specimens were the property of the RCS because 'skilled work' had been carried out upon them by 'a previous generation of surgeons'. The judge asked the jury to determine whether Kelly had taken the body parts; had intended to deprive the 'owners' of the property permanently; and was acting dishonestly. Kelly was found guilty and sentenced to nine months in prison. Changing the law: Alder HeyIf the Kelly case made perfect tabloid fodder, another scandal involving body parts was altogether much more shocking and emotive. In the late 1990s, it emerged that hospitals across England had harvested thousands of organs from dead children without their parents' consent. At Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool alone, it was found that 2,080 organs had been removed from 800 children. Although parents had given consent for autopsies to be carried out on their children's bodies, they had either specifically requested that all organs be kept together for burial, or they had simply not been informed that the hospital might retain organs. In the wake of the scandal, the Government changed the law so that relatives must be fully informed of exactly what will happen to a body if it is left with the hospital. Von Hagens: 21st century bodysnatcher?Although von Hagens insists that all the bodies displayed in his exhibition come from donors, the same cannot be said of the bodies held at his Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg. In 1999, a German magazine claimed to have traced the bodies and found them to be those of 56 Siberian peasants and mental patients from Novosibirsk. Von Hagens does indeed have a contract with the Anatomical Institute of the University of Novosibirsk, which is licensed to collect unclaimed bodies. One particular case horrified many visitors: one of the bodies had Cyrillic characters tattooed on its arm, suggesting that the owner may have been a former prison camp inmate. Von Hagens denies this, saying that the tatooed body belongs to a German citizen and a personal friend. Nevertheless, the connotations were appalling for many Germans, some of whom demonstrated against the artist. When his exhibition opened in Cologne, it was greeted by protestors bearing the banner 'Mengele 2000'. Images: Mary Evans Picture Library, PA News |
