I see dead people.

This weekend I went to Body Worlds with my Nearly Mother-in-Law. My NMIL is a nurse, and has been itching to see the exhibit–peering at people’s bodies is her stock and trade, you see. The Actually is a squeamish little baby, so he and his father went to the movies while his mother and I perused the corpses.
The museum controls the number of gawkers guests by registering people for specific viewing times, and even so it was nearly impossible to see the specimens through the crowd. It was oddly silent. The exhibit begins with the skeletal system, and as I was gazing at a femur I heard someone behind me murmur “I can now say with authority that the leg bone is connected to the knee bone.”
I laughed, loudly, and turned to smile appreciatively at the joker, only to see a host of disapproving faces staring back at me with their electronic exhibit guides pressed to their ears. It was a tough crowd.

The body parts displayed in cases throughout the rooms were fascinating. I enjoy seeing a spleen as much as the next girl, especially when it is accompanied by a detailed explanation of its function. The mold of the arteries in a child’s legs resulted in what looked like an intricate pair of tights made of red ferns, the capillaries almost too tiny to see. The lungs were a highlight, as I had forgotten that they are fleshy and solid, not the hollow rice-paper bags of air I picture. I also liked the dried sagittal corpse-slices–sort of like people-jerky–in which you could see the relative positions of the various organs, and their sizes. The liver is always higher up and bigger than one expects.
But my favorite part, by far, was the embryo table. This was in the Embryonic and Fetal Development Room, for which I stood in line for a good ten minutes. The popular, controversial attractions were the fetuses and the “reclining pregnant woman,” with her eight-month-old fetus exposed. But in my opinion, the embryos were the one thing worth both the price of admission and the crush of the obnoxious and somewhat odorous crowd.

Embryos from four to eight weeks were floating in cylinders of clear liquid on a black table. The detail was astonishing. Pinprick eyes and beyond-Lilliputian hands, enclosed in a fragile amniotic bubble. The seven-week-old embryo was large enough that you would have felt its weight when you cupped it in your palm. The six-week-old embryo didn’t look remotely human, but seeing it there, in three dimensions, it was obviously something. Obviously a tiny creature.

My experience of early pregnancy has been that it is supremely difficult to believe that there is actually a wee human busily growing in your Lady Parts. Some days, after I had spent hours on the bathroom floor, too nauseated to move, I would look at the pictures in A Child Is Born, and try to convince myself that there was a living thing inside of me. I never quite believed it, but the next time I am pregnant I think the concept will be much clearer, having seen the miniscule embryos floating curled in their jars, their knobbed spines clearly visible through the glass.

The part of Body Worlds everyone talks about, the feature that causes the Actually to turn subtly green at its mention, is the selection of REAL! DEAD! BODIES! divested of their skin and posed more-or-less intact at points along the exhibit*–playing chess, or running with all their muscles stripped from the bone and flaring out behind them. The ostensible purpose of these active cadavers is to illustrate the complexity and wonder of our own bodies. I agree that our bodies are complex and wondrous, but alas, this is not the message I took away from viewing this part of the collection. Instead, it seemed like a monument to the inevitability and omnipresence of death. The fact that our bodies are–unless plastinated–temporary, and mortal. The fact that scores of people who had walked through this same museum were dead right now. The corpse playing basketball fairly screamed “I DIED!”
“Everybody dies!” enthused the smiling, skinless man on horseback.
“Even children!” said a tiny boy made of veins, giving me the thumbs-up.
“Even babies!” squeaked a fetal chorus.
“Even YOU,” hissed a flayed, chalk-bradishing teacher. His exposed eyeballs followed me around the room.

Pleasant dreams, everyone!

*Incidentally, these specimens were almost exclusively male.