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The German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who has died aged 81 of a cerebral haemorrhage, following nearly two decades of living with Parkinson’s disease, was the creator of the international exhibition Body Worlds, which generated plaudits and revulsion in equal measure whenever and wherever it toured. Frequently accused of showmanship and self-aggrandisement, the theatrical Von Hagens, always seen wearing a black fedora, was known by some sections of the media as “Doctor Death” thanks to his use of a technique called “plastination”, which he had invented to preserve human corpses. Bodily fluids, fats and organs that usually decay after death were replaced with plastics, so tissues remained intact. The corpses could then be put on display, usually with the skin peeled away to reveal skeletons, organs and muscles.
Plastinated corpses remain flexible, meaning they can be manipulated into lifelike poses – a basketball player or a trapeze artist – or sliced into cross sections. But Von Hagens often trod a fine line between scientific exposition and the macabre. Other exhibits included a dead expectant woman with her foetus still in her uterus and a man who had deliberately killed himself by driving into a tree at the place his wife had died previously. Both had donated their bodies for plastination and were exhibited along with the objects that caused their deaths.
Unsurprisingly, Von Hagens and Body Worlds – which first went on display in Japan in 1995 – were considered somewhat contentious. Religious leaders denounced him. Churches in his native Germany held requiems for the corpses. The chief rabbi of Haifa described plastination as a violation of the Jewish principle of kavod adam, or human dignity, while the Catholic archbishop of Miami deemed Von Hagens would, when arriving at the gates of hades, be treated as he had treated his subjects, unaware that the anatomist had already expressed a wish for his own body to be plastinated on death.
He was also disparaged by secular critics who simply found his work repugnant, with the Nobel laureate Günter Grass reported to have compared him to the Nazi eugenicist Josef Mengele. The journalist Jasper Gerard wrote a particularly caustic article in the Sunday Times in 2002, concluding that “the moral problem is not how Von Hagens treats the dead, it’s what [his exhibition] says about his view of the living”.
Others acclaimed Von Hagens as an emancipator and normaliser of the human physique. The Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio said he “illuminated physiology and helped us grasp the anatomical elegance of our species”. One visitor to Body Worlds, who had tried to take her own life, declared that the exhibits convinced her never to consider harming herself again. At the time of Von Hagens’s death, it was estimated more than 20,000 people had pledged to donate their bodies to him – including family members and his employees – while more than 58 million people have visited Body Worlds. The exhibition even featured in the 2006 James Bond film, Casino Royale, in which Von Hagens played a cameo role.
Over the years many legal challenges were brought against him and Body Worlds in various countries over both his acquisition of cadavers and the morality of his exhibitions, including accusations that he received corpses from Kyrgyzstan without the permission of family members or the authorities. He insisted that all corpses in his possession were donated with full consent. However, in 2002 Von Hagens was accused of accepting 56 corpses from a Russian pathologist who had apparently passed them on to him without approval. The bodies were impounded by German officials and returned to Russia. Von Hagens was not charged with an offence.
Meanwhile, in 2002 Von Hagens held a public postmortem of one of his subjects – the first public autopsy in the UK since the 1830s and broadcast in part by Channel 4 – in the Atlantis art gallery in east London before a sold-out audience of 500. This, it was argued, breached the Anatomy Act of 1832 introduced to regulate educational use of cadavers. Once again charges were never filed.
Born in Alt-Skalden, which was then part of Germany, but is now in Poland, where the town is known as Skalmierzyce, Gunther was the third of five children. His father, Gerhard Liebchen, formerly a bank clerk, was a wartime sergeant in the Nazi SS, his mother, Gertrud, was a homemaker. Having fled the advancing Soviet army towards the end of the second world war, the family lived in Berlin before settling in Greiz, a town in what would become communist East Germany.
Gunther was a haemophiliac – once given only days to live – and spent much of his childhood in and out of hospital. This stimulated an interest in medicine, specifically anatomy, and after leaving school in 1965 he studied medicine at Jena University, having witnessed his first human autopsy at the age of 17. While at university he began questioning the orthodoxy of communism and participated in protests against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The following January he made attempts to escape eastern Europe, twice failing to cross the Czech border into Austria. He was arrested and spent almost two years in prison.
On his release, the West German government bought his freedom, alongside other political prisoners, and he continued his degree at Lübeck University, later earning a doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1975. This was where he met Cornelia von Hagens, another medical student, who became his wife that year, and whose surname he took. They had three children, Rurik, Bera and Tona, before divorcing in 1989.
After graduating, Von Hagens became a lecturer at the Institutes of Pathology and Anatomy at Heidelberg where, between 1977 and 1982, he developed and patented the technology for infusing anatomical specimens with plastics. The technique had obvious practical medical uses. Students could view damaged hearts or scarred livers without waiting for somebody to donate their body, while entire corpses could also be sliced into slabs for study.
Von Hagens subsequently set up a company to supply plastinated body parts to medical institutions and eventually began to realise his technique might have commercial value via exhibitions and practical demonstrations of his methods. In this he was aided by his second wife, Angelina Whalley, a German anatomist whom he met after she attended his anatomy classes, and whom British tabloids typically nicknamed “the Bride of Frankenstein”. She managed his Heidelberg-based business and later curated his exhibitions after they married in 1992.
Despite being accused of unnecessary dramatic flair, Von Hagens, an avowed agnostic, insisted his sole intention was to educate the public about human anatomy and to end the squeamishness often associated with it. “It’s an honour to cause this controversy,” he told the Guardian in 2002 at the opening of his London exhibition. “Yes, some specimens are difficult to look at. But it has helped people discover new respect for their bodies.”
In later life he divided his time between Berlin and Guben, on the Polish border, where he had set up a plastination laboratory. Beyond his medical and business life, his interests were limited, although he enjoyed playing and listening to violin music.
Angelina and his children from his first marriage survive him.
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