I've been watching Gunther von Hagens' TV programme Anatomy for Beginners on Channel 4 (on again tonight at 11pm, and the final programme is at 11.30pm tomorrow night Thursday 27th)
It is most extraordinarily moving. Last night they cut away the rib cage to expose the lungs, then artificially inflated them so we could see what happens when we breathe. As I watched, I was acutely conscious of my own breathing and quite amazed when I realised the size of my own lungs. I had no idea of how much space they take up, and the differential when they empty and fill. And when they injected artificial blood into the circulatory system, we watched as this previously pale corpse flooded with red and began to resemble a living body.
It's appalling that our culture prefers this knowledge of our own anatomy to be hidden from us. It is the hunger for exactly this kind of information that makes people hang around traffic accidents trying to see the injuries - they are not behaving obscenely, they just have a normal desire to know about the human body, how it functions, and how it can be damaged. This seems a perfectly healthy curiosity to me.
But apparently our 'scruples' about human anatomy have gone so far that many UK medical students never even get to do a human dissection. At the programme's website you can read more about this and vote on the issue.
I wish I'd seen Gunther von Hagens' travelling exhibition Bodyworlds when it was in London. It's in the USA at the moment and about to open in Chicago and LA. But as I understand it, the exhibits are static. The wonder of the TV programme is the chance to see dissection in action - it is a real privilege in today's diverse society to be able to view one thing which we do all have in common with each other and with (most, I guess) other organisms.
Thanks to this programme, I have finally begun to understand what it means to inhabit this fragile and beautiful machine. From today, when I take a breath, I will appreciate and respect the wonder of the pumps and valves which move the oxygen through my body and enable me to be alive.
