and Its Reinvention of Anatomical Spectacle
Essay/ Review by John Thomas Hamilton Connor.
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 81, Number 4, Winter 2007, pp. 848-862
The human body and its history have become "fashionable to the point of ubiquity." Undoubtedly, the boldest example of this "body trend" is the oeuvre of Gunther von Hagens, who is neither a historian nor a scholar of the humanities but a medical doctor-cum-artist. Born in 1945 near Posen as Gunther Liebchen, von Hagens (the name originates from his first wife) began medical studies in 1965 at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena; a decade later he obtained his license after additional medical training at the University of Luebeck. Using an anatomical preservation process that he patented in 1977 while at the University of Heidelberg, he has turned the human body into a form of medical technology/material culture and/or art. The process is referred to as "plastination,".
(taken from http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/v081/81.4connor.html)
Hook and Eye: Violence and the Captive Gaze
Essay by Lisa Dickson.
Camera Obscura - 56 (Volume 19, Number 2), 2004, pp. 74-103
Using the 2000 movie The Cell (2000) and what Linda Williams refers to as the "difficult pleasures" of spectatorship, Gunther von Hagens Body Worlds is briefly touched on as a reference for "the seduction of spectacle".
http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.ocadlibrary.on.ca/journals/camera_obscura/v019/19.2dickson.html
The Anatomy of Body Worlds
Critical Essays on the Plastinated Cadavers of Gunther von Hagens
Edited by T. Christine Jespersen , Alicita Rodriguez and Joseph Starr
Description:
Since its Tokyo debut in 1995, Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds exhibition has been visited by more than 25 million people at museums and science centers across North America, Europe, and Asia. Preserved through von Hagens' unique process of plastination, the bodies shown in the controversial exhibit are posed to mimic life and art, from a striking re-creation of Rodin's The Thinker, to a preserved horse and its human rider, a basketball player, and a reclining pregnant woman--complete with fetus in its eighth month. This interdisciplinary volume analyzes Body Worlds from a number of perspectives, describing the legal, ethical, sociological, and religious concerns which seem to accompany the exhibition as it travels the world.
http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-3656-9
