Keywords
Body Worlds, anatomy
Document Type
Essay
Description
“Body Worlds” I typed into my iPod Touch’s Safari search bar and pressed enter, then toggled the results to Google Images. There’s a dead man, skinned, holding up his hide in one hand and staring out of my four-inch screen through glass eyes that won’t shrivel like his real ones did. I scroll a few images down from him and find another person. This one’s been sawn from the top of his or her or its head so many times that they look like a half-peeled banana, if that banana had a tongue and brain and throat in its peel. I flick my finger up the screen. A swarm of reddish-tinged, people-colored pixels blurs past. More bodies. More specimens. All real people. All real dead people. Each had donated her or his body to Body Worlds, and then they’d been drained, peeled, chopped, sliced, and served to the public as a traveling display educating the world on human anatomy. But not me. I closed the open tab and tucked my iPod into the outer zipper pocket of my backpack. I shuffled the Body Worlds field trip paper out of my binder and dropped it in the trash can, unsigned by a parent or guardian and as blank as the unseeing eyes in the people I’d just Googled.
Recommended Citation
Wagoner, Natalie Van
(2020)
"Human Anatomy,"
Inscape: Vol. 40:
No.
1, Article 8.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/inscape/vol40/iss1/8