Extreme provocation is the stock in trade of Professor Gunther von Hagens. The other day this German artist-cum-doctor defied British law by carrying out a public autopsy in the East End of London — the first time a corpse had been dissected in public on British soil in over 150 years.
Paying an admission fee of £12 each, around 500 people poured into a converted brewery to observe the professor going about his unlovely work. Huge numbers of others were turned away. An edited version of the three-hour event was later seen by a much more substantial audience on the mainstream British television station, Channel 4.
Working beneath a copy of Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp,” and wearing a theatrical fedora hat, von Hagens systematically chopped up a cadaver that had belonged to a lifelong heavy drinker and smoker — a man who, not long before his death at the age of 72, had signed an agreement permitting the professor to make experimental use of his remains. Applause broke out as various dismembered items, such as the deceased’s lungs and the contents of his abdomen, were held up for inspection.
However, when von Hagens got hold of a hacksaw and began noisily carving through the dead man’s skull, several people made for the exit — having, it seemed, witnessed quite enough. This was an experience for possessors of strong stomachs.
A former East German political prisoner, Gunther von Hagens, made his name by inventing the process known as “plastinisation”, whereby human tissue can be preserved in plastic. It was thanks to this discovery that he developed his much-discussed exhibition of anatomical parts, “Body Worlds,” which has by this stage toured many countries and earned the professor some £45 million.
Only too conscious that his London autopsy was of doubtful legality (the act of dissection is supposed to require a license), von Hagens declared that he was prepared to go to jail in defense of his right to undertake it. An avowed enemy of the medical establishment who despises academic elitism, he sees himself as a friend of the people. His mission, he maintains, is to democratize knowledge of the human body, and with the proceeds of his work he plans to set up a Museum of Man.
How far von Hagens really is helping to enlarge public understanding is a tricky question. But about his ability to generate controversy and to polarize opinion there is not the least doubt. While some seem happy to accept him more or less at his own valuation, others appear equally convinced that he is nothing but a cynical opportunist, an organizer of freak shows designed to appeal to the worst kind of voyeurism.
A “degrading and disrespectful stunt” was how London’s Daily Mail described the professor’s East End autopsy. One of his more thoughtful critics, on the other hand, took the view that the success of his work owes much to the fact that in today’s depersonalized, alienated, technology-dominated world, many yearn for renewed contact with the real, with the raw facts of existence. Certainly, von Hagens can be said to be taking people back to less “sanitized” times. He would surely have been at home in the 17th century, a period when public autopsies were all the rage — a source of both public entertainment and instruction.
Yet if von Hagens is re-inventing the past he is also very much a part of present trends, of the apparently inexorable tendency in the secularized West to roll back the boundaries of what it is permissible to show and do in public. Few will have been surprised that — despite the presence of policemen at his law-breaking anatomy lesson — von Hagens is to face no criminal charges.
The truth is that to have prosecuted him would have come close to prosecuting the very times we live in.
— Neil Berry, a London-based freelance journalist since 1980, is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism”.
Arab News Opinion 4 December 2002
