Body Worlds

Museum Amsterdam, Netherlands

Body Worlds is located between Dam Square and Central Station in Amsterdam. This museum exhibits over 200 real human bodies, which serve to illustrate human anatomy in detail. The exhibition focuses on how happiness affects our health and physically highlights the link between our emotional and physical states. You will be able to see the healthy effects observed in the bodies of happy people compared to the bodies of unhappy people, and how they lived better and longer.

Body Worlds is a traveling exposition of dissected human bodies, animals, and other anatomical structures of the body that have been preserved through the process of plastination. Gunther von Hagens developed the preservation process which "unite subtle anatomy and modern polymer chemistry", in the late 1970s. A series of Body Worlds anatomical exhibitions has toured many countries worldwide, sometimes raising controversies about the sourcing and display of actual human corpses and body parts. Nevertheless, Von Hagens maintains that all human specimens were obtained with full knowledge and consent of the donors before they died, and his organization keeps extensive documentation of this permission. Von Hagens emphasizes both educational and artistic aspects of his complex and innovative dissections, and offers online teaching guides for educators. He also tries to distinguish his efforts from those of competitors who may have been less thorough in obtaining advance permission from their specimen sources.