By Peter J. Smith
DALIAN, China, August 9, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The grotesque phenomenon of entertainment called “body exhibits” has now generated an entire industry in China for procuring mummified corpses for public entertainment, according to a report inÂthe New York Times.
While the corpse displays conceived by Gunther von Hagens, a 61-year-old German anatomist, achieve shock value that some say dehumanize the dead, human rights activists suspect that the cadavers used to supply this multi-million dollar industry come from the illegal trafficking in human bodies and organs that routinely happens in China.
As many as 10 “body factories” in China have sprung up to prepare cadavers for the international body exhibit market started by “Body World’s” $200 million success, the Times reports. The garish displays of human corpses have attracted 20 million visitors in science centers and museums around the world who view displays of a cross-sectioned corpse of an expectant mother revealing her dead unborn child, or a man peeled from his skin, positioned to carry it like a raincoat. Human bodies are also on display thinly sliced into 1 mm thick translucent sheets, a sight which von Hagens calls, “as radiant and beautiful as a church’s stained glass window” according to the Boston Globe.
In Dalia, 260 Chinese workers – including medical school graduates – clean, cut, dissect, preserve, and reposition human corpses in assembly line fashion at von Hagen’s plant.
Despite the concerns of human rights advocates, Premier Exhibitions, which has a $25 million stake to secure a steady supply of mummified bodies from China, claims that none of its cadavers could belong to executed prisoners or those who died of unnatural causes.
“We don’t deal with it directly, but we want to do what is morally and legally correct,” said Arnie Geller, the chief executive of Premier to the Times. “We traced the whole process. None of these would be executed prisoners.”
However according to the Times, Meng Xianzhi, spokesman for the Dalian Medical University, a Premier supplier, denied knowing where the bodies originated.
In 2004, von Hagen cremated seven bodies thought to have been from executed prisoners after it was revealed by media reports that he was using executed prisoners. All seven had head injuries indicative of being shot through the head. Officials in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic, complained that a great number of bodies removed from psychiatric hospitals and prison wards ended up in the hands of a medical institution that forwarded them to von Hagen. In all cases Von Hagen has stayed several steps away from direct involvement.
“There’s a darkness to this man, an infatuation with death that goes beyond scientific curiosity,” said Reiner Fuellmich, who represents a Russian woman who contends her father’s body was among the 51 bodies sold by a medical examiner that ended up with von Hagen. “It has never been proven that he’s done anything illegal. But he keeps showing up in the gray areas.”
The displays have been decried by religious leaders for stripping the human body of dignity and respect, saying that a person’s body should rest in peace in the grave, not in pieces as a museum exhibit.
“The dignity of the human being does not end with death,” said Rev. Michael Domke, a Lutheran pastor in Guben, who vainly attempted to keep von Hagen from opening a body factory in the depressed German town, according to the Globe. “These public displays of posed bodies are for public amusement, not education or science. They are an assault on human dignity.”
See the Times’ coverage of the displays:
China Turns Out Mummified Bodies for Displays
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/business/worldbusiness/08bodies.html?ex=1312689600&en=2dad40977d998d77&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Flayed and Partially Dissected Human Bodies Displayed in Ontario Science Centre Exhibit
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/oct/05101405.html