| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Tampa Cadaver Exhibit May Be Scuttled |
| 2005-08-14 |
| Rantburg just isn't Rantburg without a good corpse-as-artwork story. A decision by Florida's attorney general Friday could scuttle plans for a controversial museum exhibit featuring human bodies preserved and posed to reveal their inner workings. The board that oversees the use of human specimens at Florida's medical schools wants proof that the deceased or their families authorized the use of the bodies. The Tampa Museum of Science and Industry argues that the Anatomical Board doesn't have jurisdiction. Attorney General Charlie Crist weighed in Friday, writing that because the purpose of "BODIES: The Exhibition" is educational, "it is my opinion that the approval of the Anatomical Board of the State of Florida is required." What that means for the future of the Tampa exhibit, scheduled to open Aug. 20, remains to be seen. We want corpses! We want corpses! Museum President Wit Ostrenko said Friday the exhibition would open as scheduled. "It is our intention to continue to have a constructive dialogue in an attempt to resolve our differences," he said. But on Thursday, Arnie Geller, president and CEO of Premier Exhibitions, the Atlanta promoter of the exhibit, said the documentation the board wants would be impossible to obtain because the identities are unknown. The bodies were obtained legally but belonged to Chinese people who died unidentified or unclaimed by family members and were preserved at the Dalian Medical University of Plastination Laboratories in China, according to the exhibition's medical director, Roy Glover. That's how I want to go. Mummify me and send my body on a world tour. "BODIES: The Exhibition" features 20 cadavers and 260 other parts preserved with a process that replaces human tissue with silicone rubber. Skin is removed, exposing muscles, bones, organs, tendons, blood vessels and brains. Tampa is to be the U.S. debut for the exhibit. A similar human anatomy exhibit called "Body Worlds" is now showing in the United States and has drawn more than 15 million visitors since its debut in Tokyo in 1996. It has also drawn criticism from medical ethicists, however, and the condemnation of religious groups that claim it violates the sanctity of the human body. Violate, schmiolate. Bring on the gory, skinless mummies! |
| Posted by:Chris W. |
| #4 oops- missed link |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-08-14 11:12 |
| #3 damn, nothing's hotter than Girls and Corpses |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-08-14 11:11 |
| #2 Don't bother with the museum. You can get your fill just by visiting concourse A of Midway Airport in Chicago. I am not kidding. You're walking to your gate and notice a curtained display. You wonder what's behind that curtain. You go behind it and there he/she is in all his/her glory. I literally can not remember what sex he/she was though. I guess I was too dumbfounded/horrified/shocked/fascinated/titillated to think to check. My only memory is the arm bones looked so breakable and you can't make sense of the guts. |
| Posted by: Zpaz 2005-08-14 10:30 |
| #1 It's actually pretty neat, sorta like a petrified tree is only the form of a tree. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-08-14 07:46 |