 Email this article to a friend  Printable Version FREE Email Newsletter
(Warning: Contains graphic descriptions of human anatomy.) This past weekend, I worked up the courage to visit the Body Worlds exhibit in a local science museum. This is where they take the bodies of dead volunteers (who volunteered before they died, obviously), strip off their skin and body fat, then prop them up into dynamic poses where they are plasticized through a rather technical chemical process involving aspartame, sodium nitrite and yeast extract. Think Weekend at Bernie's, without the skin.
I'm not making this up. Click here to see the Body Worlds website for yourself. BodyWorlds coordinators prefer volunteers who drink a lot of diet soda, since their bodies are already half chemically preserved from the moment of death. (Actually, the part about aspartame and food additives is, indeed, a joke with really bad taste, but since aspartame degrades into trace amounts of formaldehyde, a common biological preservative, it was begging to be mentioned here...)
Anyway, this exhibit is fascinating if you have any interest whatsoever in human anatomy. But at the same time, it's also a bit creepy. Personally, I couldn't stand the smell. I'm not talking about the dead bodies, mind you, I'm referring to all the visitors wearing their noxious perfumes, body lotions and fragrance products while trouncing around in the enclosed exhibit space. The dead people didn't stink at all. It was the live ones who practically caused me to flee through an emergency exit to catch some fresh air. If chemical perfumes dulled the sense of vision to the same degree that they dull the sense of smell in people, the average consumer would be walking around 90 percent blind...
What's on display at BodyWorldsThe BodyWorlds exhibit, by the way, is viewed as either a celebration of the human body, or an affront to the sacredness of the human being, depending on who you talk to (take your pick). Personally, I thought it was really ahead of its time... if we were all living in the 19th century, that is. But in 2007, I found the exhibit to offer an outdated focus on the physical nature of all disease (and a complete lack of explanation for any other causes of disease).
On the bright side, the exhibit did make perfectly clear the health ramifications of smoking cigarettes. Actual human lungs were on display, all charcoal-colored and covered in tumors. It's not difficult to understand what smoking does to a set of human lungs when you're staring at them right in front of your nose.
Some of the bodies were surgically implanted with artificial joints (post-mortem, of course) then propped up as some sort of celebration of the genius of modern joint replacement surgery. I thought this was odd. Yes, I know, in a roomful of dead bodies, stripped of their skin and propped up into artificial poses, I noticed something that struck me as bizarre. Why would they perform joint replacement surgery on dead bodies? Was the procedure billed to Medicare?
Like a giant 3-D anatomy chartOverall, the exhibit was certainly eye opening. Speaking of anatomy, it was skull opening and chest cavity opening, too, if you consider what had been done to the bodies on display. If you're the least bit curious about human anatomy, the exhibit is quite educational. Looking at the muscles, tendons, capillaries and nerves of the human body, you can't help but be humbled and awed by the complexity of the design. The blood supply to the liver is simply breathtaking. It looks like a mass of roots from a large garden vegetable, turned upside down and colored red. Your heart pumps 1.5 liters of blood through your liver every minute! If that's not a reason to give up eating toxic chemicals, I don't know what is.
Get articles like this delivered to you FREE in our popular email newsletter
|
(FREE) Thursday evening, Mar. 25 at 6pm Pacific (9pm Eastern), call in to hear the NaturalNews Talk Hour with our special guest Mary Tocco talking about Are Vaccines Safe? Register via email to receive call-in details:
|
|
Explore NaturalPedia.com, the internet's largest natural health encyclopedia of knowledge, covering over 50,000 topics. It's free!
Visit NaturalPedia.com.
|
 NEW Product: Valley of Longevity Shampoo from the Health Ranger
• 98% Organic
• 100% Natural
• 100% Fragrance Free!
• No SLS
• No Parabens
• No synthetic chemicals
• FREE shipping in U.S. on orders over $75
Click here to read more...
|
 FREE Report: The Five Best Anti-Viral Products to Beat Influenza, Swine Flu, Bird Flu and SARS
• Top anti-viral remedies
• Where to get them now
• Four things to avoid
• Become self-reliant
• Boost your family safety
Click here to read the FREE report now.
|
|
|
Friday, May 11, 2007
Email this article to a friend
Share this article on: 
