Bodies comes to Louisville

A provocative review from Diane Heilenman in the C-J...

Louisville has finally gotten a corpse show....We need to ponder these phenomena that have swept Europe and the United States in blockbuster exhibitions since 1995....the current shows of flayed and dissected cadavers, preserved by plastination in life-like poses, have sparked sharp concerns over black-market trafficking in the dead.

Those concerns, made widely public a year ago by ABC-TV's "20/20," are clearly valid.

But there is much more to ponder than lack of consent papers.

Such as: Is it fitting to make money off dead bodies? Is it right to disassociate the person from the body, producing in these shows what amounts to the slave-monger and pornographer's creed of selling a body, not a person?

The show at hand for Louisville is not as sensational as some of the initial, classic corpse shows with hundreds of full bodies in dramatic, art-inspired poses. The Louisville show is "Bodies Human: Anatomy in Motion," which opened Saturday, March 7. It features only 11 full-size bodies among the more than 100 "specimens" of organs, bones, muscles and cross-sections. It is on view in the morgue-like underground spaces of the Mellwood Arts & Entertainment Center, a former hog-slaughter and processing plant that is now a complex of studios, galleries and cafes.

"Bodies Human" is intriguing and scientifically inclined. But that does not make ethical issues disappear....

Heilenman asks all the right questions-- about the various ethical questions that surround this project.

Tonia and I wrestled with this but then decided to take our oldest two boys to see a larger version of this in Cincinnati about six months ago. (I can't believe that I didn't blog about it!)

It was amazing-- a great opportunity to teach the kids about the staggering machinery of the body and the glory of God's creation.