Dr Death’s body shop for that unusual gift

Stuck for that last minute gift? Fed up with buying after-shave for your husband? Gunther von Hagens, better known as Doctor Death, has just the thing for you. A real human testicle, a snip so to speak, at €360 (£305)? Or, something for the mantlepiece: a blackened smokers lung, going for €3,600. And, a good-luck present perhaps for a medical student about to sit his finals —a sliver of human brain To Go. Welcome to a new kind of body shop. The 65-year-old German anatomist has converted a huge factory warehouse in Guben, on the German border with Poland, into a treatment laboratory for corpses bought in from around the world.

Sectioned up and “plastinated” — water withdrawn from the cells is replaced with a durable synthetic resin — the specimens form the basis of his Koerperwelten, Body Worlds touring exhibitions. Typically, the treated human bodies are shaped into life-like tableaux: playing chess, sprinting, riding a bike or sitting at a dining table. They are very malleable and the internal structure of the body is precisely exposed. One exhibit in the darkened room in his Guben display centre shows two corpses copulating.

Clerics have sharply criticised Dr von Hagens but so far he has fought off all legal challenges. “He is making a travelling circus out of dead people,” complained Heilgard Asmus, the Protestant church leader in nearby Cottbus. “It is a sublime form of cannibalism, coupled with macabre voyeurism,” says Canon Rainer Alfs of Essen Cathedral. The anatomist argues though that he is attempting to revolutionise the way that we look at ourselves.”This is nothing less than the democratisation of the human body,” says Dr von Hagens.



Now comes the latest step: a body supermarket, adjoining his laboratory, that allows you to take a body part home with you for prices ranging from €80 to €11,000. Technically he is only supposed to sell the chunks of human to doctors, universities, teaching institutions. “We mark those bits with a red spot,” said a sales assistant at the body shop. “And if you buy a bit of elephant or rhino you will have to sign a form. Everything else marked with a green spot can be bought without restrictions.”

In fact, say customers, the controls are lax and you can pile up your shopping basket with most internal organs. Soon the shop will have an online outlet, saving the journey to Guben in the far east of Germany.

“We demand that the regional government take all legal steps to ban the sale of human segments,” says Bishop Asmus. Local schools have been forbidden from going on guided tours of the Guben complex. But the nearby community has not protested: Dr von Hagens has invested €22 million in the laboratory, 220 jobs have been created and the body parts have become a big tourism draw for a depressed corner of the country. “We rent out the space for special events,” said a spokesman for the Plastinarium, “such as doctors weddings and midnight guided tours.” What then could be more natural than to open a supermarket ready to sell the world’s most morbid wedding gifts?