German Doctor Offers Body Parts For Sale

Posted by Ivica Miskovic | Tuesday, June 01, 2010 | | 0 comments »

Body Parts For Sale Doctor Gunther von Hagens, the man behind the controversial exhibition of dead bodies, is now selling body parts.

A new mail order store in Germany is selling all manner of items, from part of a smoker's lung, to a slice of human head.

Also for sale is a cross section of a human body - with prices ranging from £100 to £14,000.

The squeamish may prefer an animal memento - a crocodile jaw or a slice of duck, for example.

Dr von Hagens - known as Dr Death in his homeland - is the inventor of plastination.

It is a process which preserves the bodies of people and animals by replacing fluids with hardened silicon.

His works have gone on display all over the world, drawing curiosity, admiration and revulsion in equal measures.

Now, the anatomist is offering a mail-order service from the German town of Guben, near the Polish border, where his factory or "plastinarium" is located.

The plastinarium has just opened, after a two-year delay when the project was heavily criticised by religious groups.

Dr von Hagens, 64, argues that his work is educational and in fact promotes better health.

But religious leaders describe it as voyeuristic, with one priest describing it as a "sublime form of cannibalism", which violates human dignity.

Von Hagens argues that what he is doing is not wrong because "corpses have no souls".

The artist gets his bodies from donors who agree that he can plastinate their bodies after their deaths.

There were rumours at one stage that he was getting them from China.

But Dr von Hagens denied this, saying the confusion arose in an interview conducted in English - his "favoured, but not first, language".

news.sky.com



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