The BODIES exhibit

Lot's of anatomy and physiology geekiness follows, read at your own discretion.

So Monday, my friend and I went to the BODIES exhibit here in Seattle. I had gone through a six week cadaver course during massage school, but this was lots more art'y than formaldehyde soaked corpses.

There were many displays of cadavers in various positions: throwing a basketball, sitting and thinking, running. One of the muscular exhibits had many of the individual muscles flayed and hardened away from the body so you could see each origin and insertion of each muscle. It was so cool to be reminded of where many of the muscles attach, how deep and thick some of the muscle groups are. The lumbar erector spinae are 2 inches deep.

The circulatory room was KILLER! They did a process in which they injected a hardening colored plastic substance into the veins and arteries, then they chemically melted away the rest of the flesh. All that was left was a perfect colored cast of the circulatory system. They did the process with many individual organs. The most fascinating of these was the kidney. The kidney is the most highly pressurized system in the body, and the cast of it's circulatory system looked like red velvet. It is completey inundated with arteries.

The fetal room was a bit difficult to take. It was medically fascinating, but I tried to just look at the pathologies without thinking too much about them. There was a fetus born with spinal bifida, one born with anencephaly Look at your own risk, and one born with abdominal herniation, which is when all of the internal organs form on the outside of the body. There were also small exhibits in which you looked through a magnifying glass into a tube that contained various developmental levels of fetuses(what IS the plural for fetus?). That was a little difficult, especially since we just found out that another of our good friends is pregnant(I had a little breakdown about that, but things are better now).

The pathologies were also utterly transfixing. There was a complete transverse cut of the brain. This brain had had a major stroke. It looked as if the entire surface of this brain had mold on it. It looked as you would visualize a circuit board that had browned out and blew many fuses. There was a brain with Parkinson's, there were many blackened lungs (this was one of the hardest parts of the exhibit, for me). There were also various organ pathologies such as liver cirrhosis, enlarged hearts, and brain tumors.

They used a distinct polymer in preserving the cadavers, but you could still smell the dead body smell underneath it. It ended up being very acrid and sickningly sweet. So after about one hour, my friend and I couldn't take the smell anymore, and had to leave. Dead body smell tends to stick with you, literally. It sticks to your skin, your windpipe, you taste it for a few hours after you've left. So we had to leave, get some fresh air, and put something else down our gullet other than dead body smell and chemical polymers.

I have to say though, I found the exhibit exhillerating. It reaffirmed my desire to study craniosacral. Looking at the inside of the skull made me remember anew how intricate, complex, and like a little factory our brains are. Seeing the Sella turcica, how it connects the front and back of the brain, how the pituitary sits in the center, and how one can affect it through craniosacral, was fascinating.

Any of you locals who have the desire, and the stomach for it, I highly suggest seeing this exhibit. I'll go with ya, if ya want.