They're flocking by thousands into Tampa's Museum of Science and Industry to see the plasticized Chinese corpses in "Bodies, The Exhibition." It's quite educational, and has many precedents and corollaries. Including Chinese corpses of questionable provenance, as earlier this year in San Francisco.

Worried that no consents had been granted by family members to display the bodies in Tampa, a Florida state regulatory board voted not to permit the show, but then backed off, along with the Attorney General, because the relevant state statute applied to medical schools, not museum exhibits. Still, it's entirely unclear how the bodies were obtained; exhibit sponsors say the deceased Chinese were "unclaimed or unidentified" and then turned over to Chinese medical schools.

I hope none of the corpses were really members of Falun Gong who died while in the care of the Chinese government, or critics of Beijing.

There was a similar exhibit in San Francisco earlier this year - again, with Chinese corpses of vague origin. I know, I know. There are a whole lot of people in China, and thus, many corpses too. But I am growing curiouser by the day about all these mystery Chinese dead people popping up plasticized, in action poses, in American museums. Why is it never clear where they came from? The Chinese government has been known to censor Internet content and try to monitor e-mail, so I'm sure they can manage to know a dead person's identity, and get the family's permission for the body's public display. Seems to me the world press ought to be finding out just who these "unclaimed" and "unidentified" dead folk are, and how they died.

There may be nothing sinister at play here. Except for the lack of information.

At any rate, the SF show raised concerns among the city's Asian population - like those that Florida officials voiced - that families of the dead persons on display had not given permission. There was also the small matter of leaking fluids, apparently not a problem in Tampa, thank goodness. A proposed SF Board of Supervisors ordinance on displaying remains was going nowhere at last report (bottom of SF Examiner local news round-up article, here).

I can't object to the educational, if graphic, nature of the plasticized corpse displays in San Francisco, Tampa, or elsewhere. But any public exhibit of dead bodies should be clearly sanctioned by the families of the deceased. If that is not possible, defer to the possible unspoken wishes of the dead, and/or their family members, to not have the remains shot full of plastic, posed athletically, and viewed by the teeming masses. After all, would you want that? (OK, then, put a notice in your wallet, and will).

Using the mystery corpses to make money, without explicit permission, smacks of crass commercialism; an infatuation with shock value; and a grave disrespect of the dead.

TO COMMENT: The regular comment feature is not in operation now. However, you can e-mail me your comments on this post, at the address accessed under "Contact," at the top of my "Main" page. I'll add them, here.

Tom Rekdal: Shortly after reading your post on the display of anonymous Chinese bodies, I came across a passage in a new book by John Durham Peters, "Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition" (University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 204-205, which in some ways parallels your reflections. Peters believes that the legacy of Rudolf Virchow, a prominent mid-nineteenth century German scientist and polymath who pioneered the art and science of autopsy, reveals something distinctive about the modern (liberal), overly-scientific imagination. I pass it along, without comment, for what it may be worth:

"The public outlet for Virchow's labors was a pathology museum he founded to be a forum for medical education and research. Virchow's collection, which once held 23,000 specimens, many of them personally hand-labeled by him, lives on today in the form of the Berliner Medizin-Historisches Museum. Some 300 of the specimens that once adorned his office remain among the thousand or so on display, having survived World War II and the Berlin Wall.

This hall of specimens is the main attraction: an appalling, diverse, grotesque collection of balloon-like skulls, twisted spines, gangrenous feet. As a viewer it is hard to know whether to weep, vomit, or stare. There is no professional insulation against stuff this strong. Let me put it this way: Virchow's pathological museum beats the raunchiest production of the id by a mile. It presents Lacan's corps morcele according to scientific principles. Virchow's bottled fetuses, a centerpiece of his collection, look blankly back at us from their briny wombs: they are our kind, but suffer the curious abuse of being suspended from decay for the sake of an unsentimental education in the morphological variety of the human tabernacle.

His sepulchral bottles hold some of the strangest things that await the resurrection. What sort of irreverence is it to gaze at what once a mother carried for nine months and gave birth to? What flickering love for fish and fowl once rocked her breast and still hovers about the jars? The museum as an institution, like the institution of medicine itself, tries to preserve us from the smell of our own fishy interest in the disfigured bodies. The museum's very existence presupposes a particular tuning of the soul, an advanced stage in the civilizing process. . . .One swings between wonder at the lavish excess of births, outrage at the public desecration of the dead, compassion for one's pickled kin, amazement at one's own blank tolerance, and a moistly libidinous glee at being alive. Virchow's statement at the public dedication of the museum in 1899 is a central text in the art of abyss-redemption: 'the dead material should be nothing more for us than the illustration of the living.'

He seems to warn against gratuitous fascination, but more important, he is confident that when we face pathological deformity, we will find eyes to see living form. He trusts our powers of sublimation. The doctor facing the specimen impassively is the defining model of objectivity."

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at August 25, 2005 02:23 PM