by Cersei Morrow

Created on: July 11, 2008   Last Updated: August 05, 2009

Kansas City's Union Station is one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever encountered. Last night as my friend Lora and I had dinner in the courtyard style restaurant, I looked around in wonderment at the beauty and the history of the place. It wasn't my first visit, and won't be my last. Yet every time I enter the building, I'm simply awestruck.

However Lora and I weren't there for the history of Union Station; our purpose was almost in direct contrast with the beauty of the place. We were there for the dead. Union Station currently has an exhibition of Bodies Revealed, real bodies preserved in a polymer state. We were there for a lecture discussing the ethical concerns regarding exhibitions of this sort. As you can imagine, the concerns are numerous.

* Where do the bodies come from?

* Have people actually consented to this?

* Is it some kind of gruesome art form, or a legitimate, interesting way to educate the public about anatomy?

* Is it ethical to display the dead bodies of actual people as a kind of macabre sideshow?

The answers to most of these questions are either vague or outright unknown. The bodies do come from China. In most exhibits of this type, such as "Body Worlds", the owners clearly state that they are the corpses of the unclaimed dead. Union Station's exhibit claims to be bodies of people who consented to having their bodies donated to science for educational purposes. However at this point Union Station has seen no consent forms, despite numerous requests.

The history of the dissection of human cadavers is extensive. We've all heard the history of seemingly ghoulish grave robbers presenting medical schools the freshly dug up corpses needed for medical students in exchange for payment. And at that point in history, the grisly business of stolen bodies was imperative for the advance of medical science. Human dissection was taboo; however, if a gall stone needed to come out or a cesarean was needed, without benefit of anesthesia, as it was done in those days, wouldn't you prefer a surgeon who had practiced on a real person rather than a pig?

Yet today we have no essential need for the robbing of graves, the desecration of the human body. We have mapped the human body. There are models, diagrams, even computer generated virtual reality patient programs. With all of this technology is an actual human body even needed for healers to examine, much less the general public to gawk at?

There are so many unanswered questions, that no one, I believe will ever have a definitive answer to. I for one, am unsettled by what is referred to at the exhibit as "The Fetal Room", where there are the preserved bodies of fetuses from nearly conception to a full term infant. I get a sinking feeling in my gut when I have seen the photos of the body of a dissected pregnant woman, complete with intrauterine fetus in the Body World exhibit.

I struggle with this, as the other bodies don't bother me. I think it is important for people to understand the body which with they spend their entire life. An actual body can be awe-inspiring as a facsimile can never be. As for consents and so forth . . . . I am of the "meh?" opinion. Which is not to say I don't understand why people are upset, because I do, truly I do. Personally though . . . having seen my fair share of death and dying . . . I'm confident in saying the human body is only sacred as long as we are present in it. The body that is left after death is, of course, to be treated with respect, because it housed that particular person and served them well in life. But it is still only the byproduct of a life, not the life itself.

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