Dr Death is back!

Switching on the TV last night whilst eating a fruit salad, I nearly spat my food out. It's not every day you get to watch a human body being dissected in front of a TV audience. Gunther Von Hagens is back, following up his recent Anatomy for Beginners with another TV series, Autopsy: Life and Death. Whilst many "open minded" individuals have praised him for educating us about anatomy, I just can't take this guy seriously. With his trademark fedora hat and his german accent: "I vill now dissect ze intesteens", he's looks part Freddy Kreuger, part Dr Frankenstein. Seeing the reactions of the TV audience, and hearing their nervous laughter, it's clear that Von Hagens is the star of the show, not his corpses. You have to ask yourself, if some run of the mill professor did the same thing at 11.30 on Open University, would anyone be watching?

In fact everything he's done over the past ten years merely demonstrates that his anatomy show has more to do with publicity and shock value than with anything remotely educational. According to the Chicago Tribune, when he originally promoted his touring exhibitions of flayed cadavers, he sent the corpse of a pregnant woman, her torso cut open to reveal the foetus - on a bus ride around Berlin to promote the Bodyworlds exhibition taking place there. The city's Jewish leader compared the exhibits to the lampshades made from human skin at Nazi death camps. Churches held requiems for the dead. In Mannheim, the German Anatomical Society tried to block "Body Worlds" from opening in 1997.

When Von Hagens exhibited his Bodyworlds show in London a few years ago, I remember arguing with a friend who visited to the show. Responding to my criticism, she asked "How can you judge a show you've never been to". It's a line of argument I've never found particularly convincing. After all, do you have to go to Stringfellows in order to find pornography demeaning? The next agrument I keep hearing is that people have willingly 'donated' their bodies to his project. Well according to Wikipedia, it's not at all clear that they have. Finally, there are the statistics, "17 million visitors can't be wrong". Well, people have always been attracted by the macabre, so what's new?

I may not have been to Bodyworlds, but I've seen Von Hagens at work, and he looks more like a travelling freak show host than a scientist. People are fascinated by freaks, and with the exception of Michael Jackson, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone stranger than Von Hagens.