BodyWorlds2
Apr. 6th, 2006 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaI went to BodyWorlds today, and it was fabulous. I left with a total learning high and that sense that things in the world connect differently than they did before I went into the exhibit.
I don't even know where to start. It was really interesting, and simultaneously maddeningly obscure. The audio guide was dull and unhelpful. I left with more questions than I started with. Like, "How did they do that?" I have a basic sense of it, but the blood vessels floating in fluid in the shape of the limbs from which they emerged was mind blowing. (They also had the blood vessels of a complete lamb: Little Lamb Who Made Thee?, indeed!)
I also wanted to know how they transport the specimens.
Things I learned about:
* the thalmus - children are born with it, then it is absorbed.
* the prostate is way bigger than I ever imagined.
* a section of the nasal cavaties was strangely graceful, it looked like the curves of a stringed instrument
* bone growth and how bone tissue differs from any other tissue
* the ligature of the body is gorgeous, I couldn't get enough of looking at the way hands are put together. Absolutely gorgeous, it's like lace.
Queasy factor: I had one wave of panic, which quickly disappated when I realized it wasn't the dead people causing it, but the crush of living people. It wasn't horribly crowded, but it was extremely well attended and one part of the exhibit was a little close.
Just generally, seeing the bodies and the way everything fits together was beautiful. It gave me a new respect not only for the human body, but my own.
Social commentary:
There was a section on pregnancy and fetal development. It was behind a little curtain, seperate from the rest of the exhibit. They had one cadaver containing a fetus. She'd died before the fetus was independantly viable, and with foreknowledge of the event had gifted her body to science.
The samples of fetal tissue were gathered from a variety of different collections and displayed with a disclaimer notice.
A fetus at four weeks apparently has several organs already fairly developed. However, it is about the size and shape of a booger to the naked eye. At eight weeks its about the size of a pinky and still more tissue than baby looking.
At 20 weeks it looks like a baby, and how much it grows over the next five weeks is phenomenal.
Looking at the fetus inside the host was also fascinating... How does everything fit in there?
Anyway, I found the pregnancy/fetus section to be one of the most visually informative aspects of the show. I thought it was tasteful, respectful, blah, blah, but I couldn't understand what was different from these corpses from the other ones already on display. This is part of the normal process of human development. The fetuses are just as dead as the rest of the corpses, why are they treated differently?
Even odder, most of the anatomical models were male with anatomy intact. (Penises have always looked so incredibly exposed and vulnerable to me.) One man was complaining about the penises to one of the docents at the end of the show. "I didn't feel comfortable having my daughter see these!" he said.
I felt like, "Dude, you are showing your daughter dead bodies, why draw the line at penises?"
There were a lot of very young children there. I didn't think things were set up very well for their viewing, just in terms of the required amounts of literacy to understand what one is seeing, not to mention the height of the display cases.
And parents who think that exposure is enough to create learning have another thing coming. I think of this as the "Baby Einstein" approach to life. Unmediated access to information doesn't necessarily mean learning. The kids were asking such great questions, they are naturally inquisitive, and the parents, despite bringing them to the exhibit, weren't really interested utilizing that curiousity. It drove me batty.
(Baby Einstein is a series of videos for infants featuring non-linear narratives with puppets and classical music played electronically. I don't see that it achieves anything aside from visual stimulation, which they already get plenty of from the real world, and a taste from bad synthesizer adaptations of classical hits.)
In anycase, it was interesting, informative, strangely beautiful, and I recommend it.
I don't even know where to start. It was really interesting, and simultaneously maddeningly obscure. The audio guide was dull and unhelpful. I left with more questions than I started with. Like, "How did they do that?" I have a basic sense of it, but the blood vessels floating in fluid in the shape of the limbs from which they emerged was mind blowing. (They also had the blood vessels of a complete lamb: Little Lamb Who Made Thee?, indeed!)
I also wanted to know how they transport the specimens.
Things I learned about:
* the thalmus - children are born with it, then it is absorbed.
* the prostate is way bigger than I ever imagined.
* a section of the nasal cavaties was strangely graceful, it looked like the curves of a stringed instrument
* bone growth and how bone tissue differs from any other tissue
* the ligature of the body is gorgeous, I couldn't get enough of looking at the way hands are put together. Absolutely gorgeous, it's like lace.
Queasy factor: I had one wave of panic, which quickly disappated when I realized it wasn't the dead people causing it, but the crush of living people. It wasn't horribly crowded, but it was extremely well attended and one part of the exhibit was a little close.
Just generally, seeing the bodies and the way everything fits together was beautiful. It gave me a new respect not only for the human body, but my own.
Social commentary:
There was a section on pregnancy and fetal development. It was behind a little curtain, seperate from the rest of the exhibit. They had one cadaver containing a fetus. She'd died before the fetus was independantly viable, and with foreknowledge of the event had gifted her body to science.
The samples of fetal tissue were gathered from a variety of different collections and displayed with a disclaimer notice.
A fetus at four weeks apparently has several organs already fairly developed. However, it is about the size and shape of a booger to the naked eye. At eight weeks its about the size of a pinky and still more tissue than baby looking.
At 20 weeks it looks like a baby, and how much it grows over the next five weeks is phenomenal.
Looking at the fetus inside the host was also fascinating... How does everything fit in there?
Anyway, I found the pregnancy/fetus section to be one of the most visually informative aspects of the show. I thought it was tasteful, respectful, blah, blah, but I couldn't understand what was different from these corpses from the other ones already on display. This is part of the normal process of human development. The fetuses are just as dead as the rest of the corpses, why are they treated differently?
Even odder, most of the anatomical models were male with anatomy intact. (Penises have always looked so incredibly exposed and vulnerable to me.) One man was complaining about the penises to one of the docents at the end of the show. "I didn't feel comfortable having my daughter see these!" he said.
I felt like, "Dude, you are showing your daughter dead bodies, why draw the line at penises?"
There were a lot of very young children there. I didn't think things were set up very well for their viewing, just in terms of the required amounts of literacy to understand what one is seeing, not to mention the height of the display cases.
And parents who think that exposure is enough to create learning have another thing coming. I think of this as the "Baby Einstein" approach to life. Unmediated access to information doesn't necessarily mean learning. The kids were asking such great questions, they are naturally inquisitive, and the parents, despite bringing them to the exhibit, weren't really interested utilizing that curiousity. It drove me batty.
(Baby Einstein is a series of videos for infants featuring non-linear narratives with puppets and classical music played electronically. I don't see that it achieves anything aside from visual stimulation, which they already get plenty of from the real world, and a taste from bad synthesizer adaptations of classical hits.)
In anycase, it was interesting, informative, strangely beautiful, and I recommend it.
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Date: 2006-04-07 10:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-07 12:00 pm (UTC)http://www.dmns.org/main/en/