Body Worlds 2

Took at day trip with friends to the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences and saw the Body Worlds 2 exhibit they had on display! The exhibit is on human anatomy using real human bodies that were donated to science. All the bodies on exhibit were preserved through a plastication process, meaning that all the tissued were rubberized, allowing them to hold their shape and be positioned in upright displays. While there were also cross sections and individual organs displayed, that main attraction was in the full body statues. Depending on the particular system or theme being focused on, the statues were positioned in interesting poses and dissected to show off their focus with a flair of art.

There was a baseball player posed at the end of his swing to show off core muscles in both tightly contracted and stretched states. Some were posed outside the realm of recreation however, for instance a woman with her arms up and all the muscles of the back cut and pulled out in the rough shape of angel wings, showing off her spine and rear organs. A couple of the displays were just plain weird; 'Drawer Man' was an adult male with 'drawer-shaped' sections of muscle and organs pulled out all over his body. One display, called Exploded Man, had a man with each organ and muscle and and bone pulled away from each other and hung in out in a sort of huge immobile wind-chime.

I enjoyed the exhibit very much, although as always, some parents thought this was the perfect place to bring screaming children (I couldn't help but noticing that the other children in the exhibit were dead quiet little angels). It was a little unsettling that the bodies of all those people were drawn up like that after they died, but the exhibit was funded by personal donations and I guess that they were pretty much done with their bodies anyways.