Controversial Bodies:
How to View Plastinated Corpses
About 75 people participated in a day long conference on December 5 at the Kansas City Public Library to examine the legal, commercial, artistic, and educational aspects of plastinated bodies.
Over the last decade, millions of people have paid $25 or $30 per ticket to see museum displays of carefully dissected, beautifully preserved, and artfully displayed corpses.
The companies that assemble these exhibits and the museums that host them have made millions. The displays, which offend some people and exhilarate others, claim to be educational. Critics deem them disrespectful or immoral.
Controversial Bodies: How to View Plastinated Corpses featured presentations and discussion by a panel of distinguished physicians and scholars from across the country.
The panel discussed ways in which such exhibits have changed over the course of history, the ways in which they reinforce or undermine traditional moral sanctions regarding the treatment of the dead, and analyzed the implications for broader debates about the commodification of the body.
This program was funded in part by the Kansas Humanities Council, a nonprofit cultural organization organization promoting understanding of the history, traditions, and ideas that shape our lives and build community.
Other funding was provided by the Sirridge Office of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the University of Kansas Medical Center's History and Philosophy of Medicine Department, the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences and the Kansas City Public Library.
The Panel:
Barbara Maria Stafford, PhD: Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. Author of Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine.
Lynda Payne, PhD, RN: Sirridge Missouri Endowed Professor in Medical Humanities and Bioethics and Associate Professor of History, University of Missouri at Kansas City. Author of With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England
Farr Curlin, MD: Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Chicago, author of Religion, Conscience and Controversial Clinical Practices
Linda Segebrecht, Director of Education, Union Station Science Museum, Kansas City.
John Lantos, MD: John B. Francis Chair in Bioethics, Center for Practical Bioethics, Kansas City, author of Do We Still Need Doctors?
Geoff Rees, PhD: Instructor in the Department of Religion, Health, and Human Values at Rush Medical College, author of Trading Faces:A Case Study in the Science of Identity, Aesthetics, and Ethics
Callum Ross, PhD: Professor of Anatomy, University of Chicago, Director of the Human Morphology course at the Pritzker School of Medicine
Richard Randolph, Ph.D: Associate Professor, Bioethics Department Chair, Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences.
