Body Worlds exhibition

Next term, many of our senior boys will have an opportunity to visit the remarkable Body Worlds exhibition at the Centre for Life.

Body Worlds has been seen by over 38 million people worldwide but the exhibition here in Newcastle until early November has never been seen in the UK.

It provides a fascinating and unique education in the human body.  The exhibits are real human bodies and organs captured and preserved by a process known as plastination.
I was fortunate enough to attend a preview of the exhibition just before half term.  The introductory talk by Dr Angelina Whalley suggested viewing the exhibition to be life-changing.
For me, the exhibition was certainly life-affirming in its ability to induce awe and wonder at the brilliance of the human body.  I was left both humbled and amazed by the body’s functionality and complexity.

The squeamishness I anticipated on entering the exhibition never materialised.  The exhibits – particularly in their dynamic poses – capture and celebrate life and vitality not mortality.
It is over thirty years since I studied science at school without ever really acquiring a good understanding of the human body’s different and complex anatomical systems.  The exhibition isolates each of these systems – skeletal, nervous, respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive – and then shows clearly their complex and complementary integration.

The exhibits highlight the arrangement and proportions of the body’s organs.  The brain and heart have an obvious prominence in the hierarchy of vitality.  Both were smaller – but no less amazing – than I had imagined.

These days it is very easy to be wowed by the latest technology but the Body Worlds exhibition left me feeling, by comparison, how primitive and unreliable most technology is.

The exhibition is a valuable and possibly life-changing opportunity for all students of science and what makes us human.