4 August 2012 Bodyworlds

The Bodyworlds exhibit at the Science Museum of Virginia is freaky and fascinating. I think we’re so used to seeing plastic models of things that it was easy to forget that we were looking at the insides of real bodies–plastinated. It was even easier to forget or ignore that these bodies had once been living people. Many of the bodies are posed in athletic stances–baseball player, ballet dancer–so that visitors could see particular muscles or organs in action, so to speak. I couldn’t help but wonder if these bodies, when alive, had ever adopted these poses.

It’s just as well that photography was not allowed in the exhibit.