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Professor Harold Ellis CBE Mch FRCS

Emeritus Professor of Surgery, University of London
Author of Clinical Anatomy: A revision and applied anatomy for clinical students
Member of Applied Clinical Anatomy Group of Guy's, King's and St Thomas' School of Biomedical Sciences, Division of Anatomy, Cell and Human Biology

Let me say at once that I have not yet seen Professor von Hagens' exhibition itself and I am well aware of the hazard of commenting on the real thing merely from what one sees on 40 minutes of television presentation.

The professor claims that his technically brilliant dissections of men, women, infants and foetuses, in health and disease, 'give better insight into our bodies' and that 'confrontation with the dead body teaches us to accept our natural impermanence'. I agree that doctors and medical students will be intrigued to see dissections which have been performed in a novel and technically interesting way, and which might possibly help them appreciate the finer nuances of normal and pathological anatomy.

Yet these doctors and medical students form but a fraction of the millions of visitors who queue to see the professor's show. Are the rest, the lay public, there to learn anatomy or, more likely, to experience the frisson, the shock, the excitement, of gazing at a dissected corpse playing chess, or holding his flayed skin like a cloak over his arm, or sliced into paper-thin sections? Or does this audience regard the exhibits as the latest and craziest form of pop art?

If the worthy professor really wants to teach the public about the undoubted wonder of human anatomy, does he really need to employ shock tactics? Why cannot he, like the rest of us more humble teachers, employ the excellent anatomically accurate anatomical models made of plastic, rather than plastinated corpses?

And where did all these young, apparently healthy men and women come from? Especially the heavily pregnant girl with her well-developed foetus in-situ? Did they really all consent to being toted around the world to be stared at for 'educational purposes'?

Does it really help the lay public to appreciate disease by seeing pathological specimens? Does the patient who is recovering from a stroke – or his or her relatives – really want to see a brain with a massive intra-cerebral haemorrhage? Does a pregnant woman benefit from seeing a foetus with the horrible, and fortunately extremely rare, condition of anencephaly? Is it education or titillation?

One duty of an educator is to be accurate and, regretably, I heard a lot of errors. The ones I jotted down were: lungs are blackened by inhaled carbon, not tobacco; the sciatic nerve crosses the ischium, not the ilium; the bladder is not 'in the ischium', it lies behind the pubis; the diaphragm is not a membrane, it is a powerful muscle.

As a money-spinner, the professor has hit the jackpot and I congratulate him on his enterprise: as a showman he is super. In providing a teaching aid for the medical profession, yes, he gives us some light relief from studying Gray's Anatomy or even my less weighty Clinical Anatomy. As a shock provider for the lay public, he has triumphed. As an example of modern art I am not in a position to judge. As a teaching aid to the non-medic, well, give me a plastic model to use in my lectures any time.

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