Body Worlds
A few days ago I took a day off and we brought Sammie to the San Jose Tech Museum to see Body Worlds, an exhibit that shows off the human anatomy through ‘plasticized’ human cadavers (or ‘plastinates’ – a rather cute term). We weren’t sure how she’d take it, but figured that the worst that could happen was that if she was scared we’d just leave and go to the rest of the museum and be out a couple of bucks. They had signs out front suggesting that the exhibit be for children 10 and above, but we decided to take her in anyway.
Sure, she was scared at first (she didn’t like the skeletons at the very entrance), but the exhibit really emphasizes life and is really tastefully done, so there are lost of giant pictures of people of all ages including young kids, and those helped make her comfortable. We did get some disapproving looks from other people, but we ignored them. Children are surprisingly resilient, emotionally as well as physically, and when we got to the section on fetal development Sammie was really into it. She kept wanting to the see “mommy” and the “baby” even after we’d already gone to the end of the exhibit. And later on in the exhibit, she didn’t give the cadavers on display as much as a 2nd glance but instead seemed more bored than anything else.
As for myself, it was interesting but not nearly as moving as I’d expected. The exhibit was rather short, shorter than the other versions I’d heard about elsewhere in the country, and the plastinates seemed almost fake, which took away the emotional impact. Intellectually it was interesting, but it was more like touring Madame Tussaud’s and not as visceral as I would have hoped. I thought I would have left with a much stronger sense of my own mortality, but instead I thought I’d simply learned a few things and seen some ‘neat stuff’. On top of that, there were a few of the displays that seemed to be almost a bit gratuitous where they seemed to have used the body more as a material for a piece of art as opposed to a work of art in and of itself. Nonetheless, it was fascinating and worth a trip — even with kids.
Did you take pictures? I’m planning on going in December with Gina. If it wasn’t moving for you, I wonder how much of an impression it could make on a doctor…
No flash photography, so we didn’t bother. I think a doctor might have even more of an appreciation for it, but that might still be on an academic level.