Insides out

Out of all the provocatively dissected cadavers in ``Body Worlds 2," the exhibition that opens tomorrow at the Museum of Science, it's ``Drawer Man" who really stops me. He stands tall and complete, rectangular chunks of him pulled out like drawers to reveal the parts within: here, a piece of leg; here, a portion of his head. It's a jarring effect, part anatomical, part aesthetic. But what gives me the most pause, I think, is his skin.

``Drawer Man" has more skin than his fellow cadavers (the technical term here is `` plastinates," named for the preservation process that allows a corpse to be on such dramatic display). And while his internal organs appear to be alive -- so brightly colored that they practically look fake -- his skin is ghostly white. It is the fiercest reminder I've seen that this person is real, and dead.

Gunther von Hagens , the creator of plastination and of this traveling show, would say that the man who became ``Drawer Man" is a hero, a patron of science. Von Hagens dedicates his exhibition -- which runs in Boston through Jan. 7 -- to the body donors who made it possible. He calls his life work, which also includes an autopsy performed in a London art museum, the ``democratization of anatomy."

The hundreds of thousands of people who have come to this show, in every city it hit, clearly tend to agree. ``Body Worlds" taps into a deep-seated fascination with human anatomy, a desire to claim for ourselves what was once the closed-door realm of doctors.

But while the exhibition does unlock doors, it also serves as a vehicle for self-promotion. It opens with a wall of text that's filled with bold declarations: This is ``a towering achievement in the field of anatomical science"; von Hagens ``joins the pantheon of great anatomists." Within the exhibit, there is opportunity for product placement: One body is arranged as a skier -- albeit one whose muscles and tendons hang down like feathers -- and the word ``Plastination" appears on his skis.

And beneath every full-body form is a plaque bearing a title, a date, and von Hagens's signature. He, after all, is the artist.

That combination of art, science, and self-promotion is what I find unsettling; it's hard not to detect a lot of glee in these arrangements, and in the plastination process itself. Von Hagens's voice turns up occasionally on the audio tour, offering such statements as ``Like the baby who sucks the milk out of mother's breasts, I sucked by vacuum the acetone out of the specimen." With his German accent, I'm sorry to say, he sounds a bit like Dr. Strangelove.

That's what makes ``Body Worlds" feel, at times, self-defeating. In general, this exhibit is not absurd or gory, and it's plainly educational. As a study of anatomy, it's fascinating -- who knew a larynx could be so big, or that a diaphragm was shaped like that? And, as von Hagens and his wife and coexhibitor, Angelina Whalley , like to repeat, it also functions as a gallery of cautionary tales: case after case of organs ravaged by disease, some of them man-made. These are your lungs with emphysema. This is your pancreas with cirrhosis.

Bend down to study the organs and bones, and it's easy to forget that they are real. The preservation process leaves an otherworldly sheen. The cross-sections, often displayed to show the effects of disease, are sepia-toned and almost look like portions of a tree.

But the full-body plastinates are undeniable people, who start off in demure poses and become, as the exhibit goes on, more boldly arranged. One woman is split in three, her organs rising up like a tower from her middle. Many have eyes -- some are real, some made of glass -- and a thin line of hair. Their digits sometimes flutter, ghostlike, in the air-conditioning breeze.

If they seem strangely alive, von Hagens hopes this will be a recruitment tool. His is a growth business -- he has three versions of this exhibition, and a venture to sell plastinates to medical schools -- so he is constantly looking for donors. A display on donation turns up discreetly behind the sliced-apart cadaver of a camel and promises a form of immortality. It includes a testimonial: ``I was so impressed with what an artistic and useful purpose it could be put to that it seamed [sic] such a waste," one donor wrote, to do anything else with his body.

Still, this is a strange way to live on, ageless and anonymous and vigorously transposed. The cadavers we meet are not ``Friederich Stein," or even ``German Man, 45," but ``Head Diver," ``Yoga Lady," ``Man at Leisure" -- this one, eyes bugged and mouth agape, looks more like a character from an aliens-attack flick, gazing up at the sky with horror. (A pregnant woman, cut open to reveal her 5-month-old fetus, is set off in a side room that the morally offended can easily avoid.)

There are reasons, beyond mere aesthetics, for most of these dissections, generally arranged to highlight a particular part of the anatomy. ``Drawer Man," for instance, is meant to show us the compactness of the organs. I stop, again, at ``X-Lady," her legs crossed and her cheeks splayed out on either side. You can see, here, the astounding symmetry of the human form, the way the hip joint mirrors the shoulder joint, the workings of the jaw. You can also see a macabre attempt at art.

Many museumgoers, I'm sure, won't want to draw a line between aesthetics and anatomy. They will say that the body is beautiful, inside and out, that death is natural, that body donation is a choice. I don't deny any of it. But I also know that this exhibit wouldn't have the same effect if it were simply a series of scale models -- not a roomful of plasticized dead people. And I can't help but wonder, uncomfortably, what that means.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com.