Britain's first public autopsy in 170 years left a paying audience gaping, physicians and ethicists condemning the event, and historians contemplating the return of a long-abandoned Western tradition. Last week, German physician Gunther von Hagens autopsied a 72-year-old man in front of 400 people in a London art gallery. His goal, he says, was to shed light on autopsy and convince others to consent to this increasingly rare procedure.

Von Hagens, who gained notoriety in 1997 for his traveling "Body Worlds" exhibition, which displays human bodies and body parts (Science, 29 March, p. 2359), has long advocated a return to the days of public dissections. Beginning in Italy in the late 13th century and continuing through parts of Europe and the United States until the mid 1800s, public dissections morphed from a display of civic pride in local medical faculties into a popular form of entertainment. Such events later became taboo as more people argued against ties between human bodies and money, and as dissection fell more into the realm of science than art, according to Michael Sappol, a curator at the National Library of Medicine and author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies.

Von Hagens, who holds that autopsy is educational, is challenging the taboo. The scene outside the gallery, also the site of the Body Worlds exhibit, was so chaotic that only 33 of the audience members paid the $19 admission fee. Despite threats of arrest, von Hagens went ahead with the display, which, he says, the unidentified man and his family had previously consented to. To link this event with those of an earlier era, von Hagens performed his beneath a copy of the 1632 Rembrandt painting "Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp." He concluded the man had died of heart failure.

The event--parts of which were broadcast on British television--generated plenty of disgust. "It wasn't science--it was a spectacle, a show," said a spokesperson at the British Medical Association who declined to give their name. "We have concerns about the respect given to the person who had died." Prosecutors are reportedly weighing whether to impose criminal charges on von Hagens: In Britain, licenses are needed for both those performing an autopsy and the location where it takes place. The doctor denies he did anything illegal--and has plans to stage a second public autopsy, this time in Germany.

--JENNIFER COUZIN

Related site
Body Worlds home page