The University of Shantou exposes human corpses in its anatomy museum
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The University of Shantou in southern China, famous for its Medical Faculty, has recently opened a public exhibition of anatomy using real corpses to show the inside of the human body.
The exhibition, reminiscent of the itinerant ‘Bodies’ exhibition which has traveled the world, sometimes drawing controversy in recent years, displays the complete bodies of twenty dead people, along with organs or partial samples of many other human specimens which were donated, according to the faculty.
The objective of the exhibition is “to educate medical students and give opportunity to people outside these studies to learn about the human body and health,” Zhang Xinyu, a sixth year student of the university.
The exhibition shows human fetuses and bodies pretending to play basketball or tennis, running or practicing other exercises are also on display.
They also show corpses with livers affected by cirrhosis, black lungs of smokers, bodies cut into transverse and longitudinal strips, and ones that have only bones and blood vessels left.
The bodies, many of which are out of display cabinets and within reach of any visitor, are preserved by plastination, a technique invented in 1977 by the German artist and doctor Gunther von Hagens.
The ‘Bodies’ exhibition, which currently is on display in Atlanta and Las Vegas, has caused controversy in some cities where it has been shown; some Catholic and Jewish groups oppose to its use of real human bodies.
The exhibits shown in ‘Bodies’ also came from China, they were dissected at the University of Dalian, in the northeast of the country.
