Report of 2013 Bodies Exhibition

The article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” by Horace Miner easily sparks strong opinions among the readers. Miner invokes a sense of puzzlement in his reader by his description of the Nacirema practices concerning the human body.

In the time before scientific research, the body was described by various ideas created by people who refused to admit ignorance and instead turned myth to reality. Ever since the beginning of scientific research in the field of biology the body has turned from less of a myth to more of a tangible entity. Displayed in Document D is a comparison of the body in complete mythological form and the scientific drawing based on dissection. At the time this idea of such common materials creating the living thing that is the human must have caused an outburst, but scientific discovery must go on. This is very similar to the world of biology today, specifically neurobiology. This a a field of research that is explaining in depth how people think and that is not an explanation most people want to hear. They too do not want to be driven by such common recognizable algorithms. This is how the Renaissance has influenced the field of biology, by showing that even without the support of the public the truth must be

The Body Farm didn’t receive its first body until 1981 and there were only two kinds of body that were send to this farm. The two kinds of bodies sent here to the body farm were ones used for medical research and others which were used to help solve crimes. The research at the Body Farm increases scientific understanding of what happens to human bodies after they die. The knowledge learned from the research has been used in courts today to convict the guilty criminal in many of the cases. The Body Farm helps with many things today that people wouldnt

Miner’s 1956 ‘Body Ritual Among the Nacirema’ is an account of a fictitious tribe which displays negative dispositions of the human body and how it is regarded as sick and hideous. Miner describes how the entire ritualistic practices of the Nacirema revolve around this core issue of the body and “an example of the extremes to which human behaviour can go” (Miner, 1956). Vanity and self-image are evident throughout the account, the “Nacirema” people are using body modification from the “holy-mouth man” and “medicine men” to alter their self- image. “The human body is so bland and unexciting… just as we possess no natural weapons or protective armour, so too must we resort to techniques of our own invention in order to be visually striking.” (Polhemus and Morenko, 2004). This suggests the body is central to the ‘I’ who speaks and it is also fundamental to how we are recognised by others. Sometimes aspects of the body only appear important to us when things go wrong but, hence the tribe’s continual visitation to these “medicine men” because as humans they are trying to modify their self-image.

While there are still people who do not believe in the use of cadavers or have no interest in becoming one (which is completely fine as it is simply a matter of opinion), Mary Roach shines light on all the positive impacts that cadavers can have on human life today. From bettering our safety by being used in studies for impact tests, to furthering scientific, medical and forensics research, cadavers are a necessity to our well-being and

Despite this problem, we believe it is the same piece of wax we see, touch, or imagine. But it is not our feelings or imagination that gives us the idea. If we had evaluated these abilities, and if the wax is distorted, we would not be able to agree that it is the same wax. This study enables us to recognize that the imagination, just like sensation, does not convey the true nature of wax; rather, this difficulty indicates that only understanding, exercising its powers of conception and judgment, performs the unifying function that constitutes the self-identity of the piece of wax: “our perception of the wax is neither a seeing, nor a touching, nor an imagining… but the mind alone” (68). Although the changing characteristics of the body has been transported through our senses and imagination, the identity of the matter is provided by the understanding of the wax itself. This analysis confirms Descartes’ view that “what we thought we had seen with our eyes, we actually grasped solely with the faculty of judgment, which is in our mind” (68). Therefore, any sense of the body is actually an introspection of our mind, not an external inspection.

The human body has been coupled with various beliefs for all of history. It has been the centre and representation for questions of ethics, power and sexuality. Works like “Confession” by Linh Dinh have found ways to express these questions further. By focusing on questioning how the body operates in art, Dihn portrays and inquires a whole belief system as to how the body functions and is viewed in society.

​Kerry Howley’s who owns your body parts is a disconcerting account on the emerging trends human body parts trafficking to the high demand of tissues in the biotech industry. Howley articulates the selling of body tissues that has been either dominated by the deceased or even their families. Howley further illustrates the extent people have gone to secure the deceased body parts by stealing them without the knowledge or their family members. Howley illustrates that “Families that planned to have an open-casket funeral, cutters would patch up eviscerated corpses based on their best knowledge (Howley, 2007). It goes as far as the investigators found stuffed legs with plastic piping of its kind were found at hardware stores. During the court hearing an employee reported to have used socks rolls more than once for the same purpose, such claims were best affirmed through the surgical gloves that were recovered from the hastily revamped corpses.

The author also frequently questions the legality of the embalming process. This is in reference to the established law practices in regards to the after-death procedures:

Although grave robbing was not as large an issue after the passing of the Anatomy Act, the field still had its darkest times ahead. During the 19th and early 20th century, anatomists took advantage of the most disadvantaged sections of society including the mentally ill, people of color and poor immigrants (Cutter 2002, Halperin 2007). While these atrocities are worth remembering, anatomy truly reached its lowest point during the regime of the National Socialist Party. Corpses from concentration camps, mental facilities, and prisons were all sent to aid in research and teaching (Kaiser 2013). Throughout history, anatomists have put their morals aside for the sake of scientific advancement, but it is clear that this reached its most inexcusable

Mary Roach starts her research of human cadavers by going to a facial anatomy and face-lift refresher course. There, Roach learns that surgeons survive by modifying human remains. The author sees the distinct benefit of learning surgical methods using cadavers. Cadavers feel no agony and cannot die due to problems, cadavers offer immediate benefits for surgical study. Roach sees this as a great upgrade over how the surgery was once taught to live patients without the advantage of anesthesia.

Anatomy, the study of the human body, is a discipline of the medical sciences that flourished beyond precedent during the 17th and 18th centuries in Western Europe. During this time, many physicians, anatomists, and doctors began to not only investigate anatomy more seriously, but also to teach anatomy to more people. Dissections of cadavers became more common at learning establishments and more accepted by the general public, and by government authorities. Anatomical theatres were constructed for the mass teaching of dissections, and any and all bodies from criminal hangings were donated as cadavers to the universities. As trends grow and become popular problems are bound to become known. In anatomy, this problem was the shortage of cadavers

The Bodies Exhibition at the South Street Seaport in New York City is one of several exhibitions of its kind around the world that was first displayed on August 20, 2005 in Tampa, Florida. Similar exhibitions are showing in Vienna, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Cincinnati, Santiago, Prague, Branson, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, Hartford, and Washington D.C. The exhibit is unique, consisting of real human bodies in various forms of disembowelment. Each body system was addressed in its own individual exhibit, starting with the skeletal system and progressing through the muscular, nervous, circulatory, digestive, respiratory, urinary, and reproductive systems plus an exhibit on fetal development. Healthy and diseased

For the past two-hundred years, dissection of the human cadaver has been the gold standard for teaching aspiring medical professionals the networking and layout of the human body. Surprisingly, cadaver usage has had a rather curious history.

The body is not a place in which to live but can rather be seen as an object needing to be controlled, “there is no such thing as a body that can simply be” (Orbach,