Legal challenge to corpse art

An art show that exhibits real human corpses faces a legal challenge from the Government before it opens in London.

Professor Gunther von Hagens's travelling exhibition, Body Worlds, is due to go on show at the Atlantis Gallery in the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane in less than two weeks. The collection includes more than 25 corpses as well as parts from a further 175 dead bodies.

The Department of Health said today it would be examining the legal aspects of the exhibition. Dr Jeremy Metters, HM Inspector of Anatomy, is scrutinising the content to decide whether it contravenes the Anatomy Act, created after the 19th Century Burke and Hare bodysnatching scandal.

The intervention is a response to numerous protests about the show. These have included the parents of hundreds of children whose organs were surreptitiously removed after death in the Alder Hey scandal. They wrote to Downing Street demanding Tony Blair block the exhibition.

John O' Hare, chairman of Pity II - Parents who have Interred Their Young Twice - told the Evening Standard: "To put this exhibition on is tasteless and insensitive to suffering of all of the parents who are still going through so much trauma."

However Professor von Hagens and his lawyers are confident that there are no grounds on which it can be stopped. He said: "In every town we have exhibited we have faced a legal challenge, but we have always won." In fact the professor says he may ultimately establish a permanent collection in London, and he wants to set up a Museum of Mankind dedicated to his anatomical display.

"London, Berlin or Heidelberg are possible places for the museum," said Professor von Hagens. "But London I regard as the capital of Europe, a very international city much more open to foreign culture in comparison to Berlin.

"We shall have to see how the British people like the exhibition."

The Body Worlds show has provoked outrage and fascination alike across the world since it opened in 1997. One piece of his "anatomy art" shows the corpse of a reclining pregnant woman, her womb opened to reveal a sevenmonth old foetus curled inside.

Another shows a man, entirely skinned with his brain visible in his cut-away skull, leaning forward and contemplating a chessboard.

Body Worlds has already been seen by 8m people in Japan and Europe, and provoked anger from some Catholic clergy and Berlin's Jewish leaders.

All bodies on display come from people who freely donated their own corpses to Professor von Hagens, and 4,500 more subjects have volunteered to be preserved by him after they die.

He was accused of bodysnatching subjects from Russia - but after a police investigation no charges were made.

The professor has spent 25 years perfecting his technique, plastination, to preserve the bodies and create his works, while working as an anatomist at Heidelberg University in 1977.

The 58-year-old - nicknamed The Plastinator by his detractors, worked from his Heidelberg headquarters, The Institute of Plastination.

The bodies are frozen, thawed and then sliced into wafer-thin segments. All liquids are extracted from the slices and replaced with colour-matched polymers. Finally, the body is reconstructed into the pose planned by Professor von Hagens.

A spokesman for the Catholic Church in Britain said yesterday: "We would not make any comment before we have seen this exhibition."

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