OUR BODY: The Universe Within

I felt a little squeamish in the Nervous System and Circulatory System rooms. The brain stems, the spinal cords, the arteries… I twitched as I viewed the once functioning organs. I wasn’t surprised by my reaction, though. The mere mention of the word “jugular” makes my head feel fuzzy and my toes curl up.

Even so, I’d been looking forward to the exhibit ever since I heard of it. Real human bodies, drained of their fluids, skinned, peeled like bananas, sliced in half… honestly, what could be better!

But I speak irreverently. The exhibit was actually amazing. The cadavers are preserved through “polymer impregnation” a process that replaces the body’s water and fat with reactive plastics. So the body remains intact, even down to the microscopic level.

The bodies, and body parts, were displayed for us to view and learn from. It was a spiritual experience seeing the miracle of how our bodies are put together. Nothing, save it be a higher being, could create something so perfect and so masterfully complicated.

I learned so much about the human body. I now know how the muscle is connected to the bone, the actual size of a fetus at three months gestation, and what a “man part” looks like from the inside out (not that I looked).

Ryan and I brought Douglas and Kiana to the exhibit with us. Other children might be traumatized by such a display. Not Doug. He was only slightly interested in the dead bodies. He was more concerned with how loudly he could yell “HAIRBRUSH!” over and over and over. Kiana just drooled the whole time.