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Friday, November 22, 2002

Anatomy Lessons: I’ve been trying to figure out why the mad performance art doctor elicits such a visceral reaction in me. Is his public autopsy any different than the one portrayed by Rembrandt? Are the plasticized corpses and body parts that make up his Body Worlds exhibit any different than the eighteenth century anatomical wax models? While it’s true that artists have relied on dissection and anatomy lessons to enable them to create beautiful art, and while it’s true that some public autopsies were little more than performances, it’s also true that past behavior is no excuse for present behavior. Public executions used to be commonplace, too, but few people would want to go back to the days of gallows-lined roads. Professor Von Hagen’s “art” isn’t so much a step into a brave new world as it is a step back to a more brutal time.

Medicine has changed a lot since the days of Rembrandt, not only in the advancement of its science, but in the advancement of its heart. Once, it was acceptable for medical students to casually debase their cadavers. Today, medical students would be expelled for such behavior. Perhaps the medical profession has taken the lessons of the Nazi doctors, with their blatant disregard for the dignity of the living and the dead, to heart.

Professor Von Hagen treats his bodies in much the same way those earlier medical students treated theirs - as entertainment, and his supply of corpses may not be all that different from Rembrandt's anatomist's. His work should give us all pause. It cheapens death, and in so doing cheapens life.

posted by Sydney on 11/22/2002 07:54:00 AM 0 comments

Friday, November 22, 2002

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