Gunther von Hagens, the German anatomist who invented plastination and turned preserved human bodies into the touring exhibition Body Worlds, died on 24 July in a Heidelberg hospital at the age of 81, after a cerebral haemorrhage. His body, by his own long-stated wish, will now be plastinated too.
Few figures in modern culture sat so precisely on the line between science and showmanship. To his admirers he was a teacher who gave the public back its own anatomy; to his critics he was a carnival barker with a scalpel. Both camps bought tickets. Tens of millions of people have walked through Body Worlds shows since the first one opened in Tokyo in 1995, which makes von Hagens, by raw audience, one of the most viewed exhibition makers who ever lived.
The man in the black hat
The hat came first, before the fame. Von Hagens wore his black fedora everywhere, indoors and out, in the lab and on stage, and he liked to explain that it was borrowed from art history rather than fashion: the anatomist in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp keeps his hat on while his colleagues go bareheaded, a period mark of the man in charge of the dissection. It told you most of what you needed to know about him. He did not see himself as a technician of death but as the latest performer in a very old theatre, one that runs back through the public dissections of the seventeenth century.
His own route to that stage was crooked. Born in 1945, he grew up in East Germany, tried to flee to the West at 24, was caught, and spent two years in a Stasi prison before West Germany bought his freedom. He studied medicine in Heidelberg, and it was there, in 1977, that he worked out how to replace the water and fat in human tissue with reactive polymers. The result was a specimen that does not rot, does not smell, and can be posed. He called it plastination.
What plastination changed
The technique sounds like a laboratory footnote. It was not. It quietly rearranged several fields at once:
Medical teaching. Anatomy departments could suddenly keep durable, dry, handleable specimens instead of formalin tanks; plastinates are now standard teaching stock in universities around the world.
The museum. Body Worlds moved anatomy out of the medical school and sold it to the general public, with whole-body plastinates playing chess, riding horses, kicking footballs.
The audience’s nerve. He recalibrated what a mainstream visitor would stand in front of, holding a coffee, on a Saturday afternoon.
The donor relationship. His institute built a register of thousands of living volunteers who signed their bodies over for plastination, an arrangement with no real precedent in exhibition history.
The London chapter
Britain got the concentrated version of von Hagens. In November 2002 he staged the country’s first public autopsy in roughly 170 years, in an east London gallery, in front of a paying audience, with Channel 4 filming. Police attended after warnings that the event might constitute an offence; it went ahead, nobody was charged, and the broadcast pulled the kind of viewing figures normally reserved for football. He followed it with the Anatomy for Beginners dissection series in 2005, and in 2018 a permanent Body Worlds attraction opened at Piccadilly Circus, a few steps from Eros, which is either the perfect location or a tasteless one depending on which newspaper you read that week.
The arguments that followed him
The controversies were constant and he seemed to treat them as part of the production. Religious groups and a fair number of pathologists found the exhibitions degrading; others raised the harder question of where the bodies came from. Through the 2000s his operation faced investigations and lawsuits over body sourcing, including a Russian case in Novosibirsk and repeated claims about unclaimed corpses from China. He denied wrongdoing throughout, went to court against his accusers more than once, and insisted the whole-body exhibits came from documented donors. The register of volunteers, in the end, was his strongest answer: whatever one thought of the show, the queue of people asking to join it after death was real.
In 2008 he learned he had Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis he made public in 2018 in an open letter, writing about the strange position of an anatomist watching his own nervous system fail. He spent his last years quietly, with his wife Angelina Whalley, the physician and curator who designed the exhibitions and ran them alongside him for three decades.
The last exhibit
He had long said that he wanted to remain in the show: his plastinated body, he hoped, would one day stand at the entrance of a Body Worlds exhibition and greet the visitors. Whalley is expected to carry out that wish. It is hard to think of another figure in the arts or sciences whose estate planning doubles as a final work, and that is probably the summary he would have chosen himself. The man is gone; the exhibit is in preparation.
