Moved by mother and child

It says much about our horrified fascination with our bodies that an exhibition of body parts in an obscure gallery in the East End has provoked more column inches in the media than some major exhibitions in the National Gallery are given in their whole runs.

Is it justified? We can all go and see the Lindow man and other bog people in the British Museum, their faces twisted far more ghoulishly than the serene, flayed faces in Professor Gunther von Hagen's displays. Egyptian mummies on display in many museums have a name and a history which gives us a frisson of pity and curiosity - like the embalmed and costumed body of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London, or those medieval bishops' tombs which underneath the robed body display the skeleton of the mortal man.

Body Worlds, by these standards, is mostly something of a damp squib. Amid a forest of tree ferns in the Old Truman Brewery, artistically arranged pink and white plasticated shapes of men and women with their muscles, nerve fibres and internal organs on display look like intricate sculptures rather than things that once were human beings.

Coloured diagrams and technical information drive home the message that this is first and foremost an anatomy lesson. It shakes but it does not stir: instead of arousing emotions of pity and awe for the beauty and vulnerability of human life, most of these displays provoked in me no more than a dry academic curiosity.

But go downstairs, to the second part of Professor von Hagen's show, and you are confronted with one of the most moving and pathetic spectacles I have ever seen - displays which, to be callous for a moment, make this the most remarkable exhibition in London. In nine or 10 boxed displays are plasticated foetuses, from 17 weeks to 33 weeks, including four with birth defects: Siamese twins, a hydrocephalic baby, one with a cleft palate and another with spina bifida. Their intelligent faces and entwined fingers are infinitely moving in a way that the Professor's flayed bodies and salami-slice crosssections do not begin to match. Each represents a life extinguished before it began; but a life staggering in its detail and individuality.

And at the end of the display is the most astonishing sight of all - a reclining young woman in the eighth month of pregnancy, plasticated like all the others, but with her belly cut away to show the foetus nestling in her womb. Many people will find the very idea of this figure unbearably horrifying, ghoulish or crude.

All I can say is that it is one of the most awesomely beautiful and moving displays that I have ever seen.