Archive

Archive for August 24th, 2007

What I did on my day off

August 24th, 2007 Jerry 5 comments

Now that I’m back to regularly scheduled days off (Wednesday and Saturday), I’ve been able to plan things a bit better.

This past Wednesday I went to see Body Worlds 3 at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

It’s a mostly interesting, sometimes bizarre exhibition of human bodies. Dr. Gunther von Hagens invented a process called Plastination that basically replaces soft body parts with plastic like substances. There has been a bit of controversy in the past about where the bodies were obtained, but OMSI seemed to be satisfied enough with the exhibition to promote it.

My use of the term bizarre is mostly on the way that some of the bodies were posed. Hard to explain, but if anyone has seen this or any of the other 2 Body Worlds, you probably know what I mean. One of the exhibits was of an adult camel. The body’s sides were open to show internal organs — ok — but the head and neck were split in thirds, with one third touching the ground, one third fully raised and the middle third at a halfway point between the two.

One of the most intriguing was a display named ‘The Skin Man’. A skinless cadaver, standing with his right arm outstretched and his complete skin draped over his right hand. Really, not as disturbing as it sounds.

Skin Man

Overall, I enjoyed the exhibition. Even with the sometimes strange poses, the bodies were treated respectfully and I actually learned quite a bit about our inner workings.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Categories: Science Tags:

Bad Behavior has blocked 235 access attempts in the last 7 days.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
This work by Jerry Gaiser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.