Knit together (Body Worlds)
Today I saw inside the most amazing creation on earth: the human body.
God is the most tremendous craftsman. I heard the other day in one of my classes that although we are like God in that we have a desire to create, we never actually create anything. We just rearrange what has already been created.
Only God could make something as amazingly complex, original, and intricate as the human body...and out of nothing to boot.
Yes, I actually touched a real human brain today...and a real human liver too. I picked them up. They were heavy.
This all was at a traveling exhibit called Body Worlds 2, currently at that California Science Center, and it included over 200 real human bodies. They have been plasticized, which is a process in which plastic is inserted into the body to preserve all the parts. It can preserve everything, even skin and flesh, but in many cases, in order to show the different structures of the body, not every layer was there.
Here is a scanned postcard of a display called "The Thinker" in which a real man (now dead) contemplates another man's head. This display was to show the wonderful artery system, just under our skin. I'm posting a link to the picture, not putting the picture right in the entry. If you are a terribly squeamish person, pass it on by. But if you think you can bear it, do look. It is one of the most amazing things ever.
The Thinker (picture)
(There are a few pictures of other plasticized bodies at this website.)
When I first heard about the exhibit, I thought it was gross. Corpses on display at a museum? Corpses put into different stances, like throwing a javelin, doing a pirouette, fencing, skiing? It sounded grotesque. Did I really want to see all those bones, muscles, internal organs, etc. peeled back and exposed?
I thought of how I reacted to surgeries on TV. Or what I thought of raw meat. Diiiiiiisgusting. But, I thought, this might be different. Plus, it was just too cool of an exhibit not to go to.
So I went, and I didn't find it gross for the most part. Most of the time it was just too fascinating to be disgusting. The only part where it got disturbing (and Randy and Jason, who also went, agree with me here) was when they had a ballet shoe on this one corpse and some hair on another female. It was just somehow really disturbing to see these live-human attributes on these dead people. It made you think, "Ohmygoodness. These are people!" And, yes, I know dead people still have hair and can wear shoes, but when you see them as all muscle and bones--no skin--and suddenly you notice an en pointe shoe on one foot or a hair done up in a bun...it's just weird.
But aside from those few quirks, the exhibit was wonderful! It was very informative in that you got to learn a lot about the human body that you never knew before (or had heard but never understood what it really was like because you'd never seen it in this way before). They also had a lot of diseased body parts because these corpses came from people who died (duh), and people usually die from something. So they had smoker's lungs, coal miner's lungs, bloated livers, hearts with heart attacks, brains with strokes, uteruses with tumors, a kidney covered in cysts, ruined arteries, you name it. People were looking at these poor organs and saying, "I am never going to smoke." or "I need to exercise more!" It was really revealing that what you put into your body determines a lot about what you look like on the inside (and how well you function).
Jason laughed a lot at the urinary tract exhibit. It was quite obvious from looking at the sizes of the male and female kidneys why there is always a longer line for the female bathrooms. Heh. :-P
My favorite part was the last room, which had unborn babies and pregnant women. All the babies and women had died for other reasons, not just because the scientists wanted them for this exhibit or something. Everyone in the whole exhibit (save the unborn babies) had donated themselves to science for this specific purpose, so nobody was being exploited without their consent. Anyway, they had little tiny babies from 4 weeks old (like 1/10 the size of a pea) up to 6 months. They had a 5-month pregnant woman and another pregnant woman not as far along. They had a bunch of little tubes that showed babies from 4 weeks to 10 weeks, and it was amazing to see how the babies grew from week to week or even during the week (for a few of them, they showed the babies at the beginning, middle, and end of the week). By the 6th week or so, you could definitely see that the baby was a human with human parts. You could even see it at 4 weeks, but not distinctly. So small but so fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wow.
Rachael, I'm sure you would have loved to see this part of the exhibit (and Meg, I know you would have loved it all!). You could find the age of your little one and see what he/she looks like. :-)
One thing that was terribly sad was that there was this little boy, about 3rd grade, who was visiting with his mother. He was looking at the 4-10 week old babies in the tubes, and he said, "Mommy, are those babies?!" She replied, "No, they are fetuses." The boy asked what a fetus was. The mom said, "They are going to turn into babies later, but they aren't babies yet." It was sad. :-( I have no idea how people could think that little being, smaller than a pea, yet with arms and legs and fingers and even a heart could not be a human.
Randy said quite a few times while we were there, "These are babies. There is no way they cannot be babies!" There is no way. Life and humanity most positively begin at conception.
It was a happy thing that the 3rd grade boy, even though his mother tried to indoctrinate him, kept referring to the "fetuses" as babies. He couldn't help it. And neither could anyone else who was looking at them at that time. Everyone kept saying "baby" when referring to them. Shapeless blobs of tissues they were not. I was especially glad to see teenage guys and girls looking at these exhibits and realizing the "fetuses" were babies. People need to know the truth. Perhaps it will guide their future actions.
At the end of the exhibit there were a bunch of books where you could leave your comments about the whole exhibit. I read through a bunch of pages, wondering what people had to say. There were a few entries that stood out, mainly the ones that said things like, "There is no way I couldn't believe in God after seeing all this."
Absolutely no way.
God is the most tremendous craftsman. I heard the other day in one of my classes that although we are like God in that we have a desire to create, we never actually create anything. We just rearrange what has already been created.
Only God could make something as amazingly complex, original, and intricate as the human body...and out of nothing to boot.
Yes, I actually touched a real human brain today...and a real human liver too. I picked them up. They were heavy.
This all was at a traveling exhibit called Body Worlds 2, currently at that California Science Center, and it included over 200 real human bodies. They have been plasticized, which is a process in which plastic is inserted into the body to preserve all the parts. It can preserve everything, even skin and flesh, but in many cases, in order to show the different structures of the body, not every layer was there.
Here is a scanned postcard of a display called "The Thinker" in which a real man (now dead) contemplates another man's head. This display was to show the wonderful artery system, just under our skin. I'm posting a link to the picture, not putting the picture right in the entry. If you are a terribly squeamish person, pass it on by. But if you think you can bear it, do look. It is one of the most amazing things ever.
The Thinker (picture)
(There are a few pictures of other plasticized bodies at this website.)
When I first heard about the exhibit, I thought it was gross. Corpses on display at a museum? Corpses put into different stances, like throwing a javelin, doing a pirouette, fencing, skiing? It sounded grotesque. Did I really want to see all those bones, muscles, internal organs, etc. peeled back and exposed?
I thought of how I reacted to surgeries on TV. Or what I thought of raw meat. Diiiiiiisgusting. But, I thought, this might be different. Plus, it was just too cool of an exhibit not to go to.
So I went, and I didn't find it gross for the most part. Most of the time it was just too fascinating to be disgusting. The only part where it got disturbing (and Randy and Jason, who also went, agree with me here) was when they had a ballet shoe on this one corpse and some hair on another female. It was just somehow really disturbing to see these live-human attributes on these dead people. It made you think, "Ohmygoodness. These are people!" And, yes, I know dead people still have hair and can wear shoes, but when you see them as all muscle and bones--no skin--and suddenly you notice an en pointe shoe on one foot or a hair done up in a bun...it's just weird.
But aside from those few quirks, the exhibit was wonderful! It was very informative in that you got to learn a lot about the human body that you never knew before (or had heard but never understood what it really was like because you'd never seen it in this way before). They also had a lot of diseased body parts because these corpses came from people who died (duh), and people usually die from something. So they had smoker's lungs, coal miner's lungs, bloated livers, hearts with heart attacks, brains with strokes, uteruses with tumors, a kidney covered in cysts, ruined arteries, you name it. People were looking at these poor organs and saying, "I am never going to smoke." or "I need to exercise more!" It was really revealing that what you put into your body determines a lot about what you look like on the inside (and how well you function).
Jason laughed a lot at the urinary tract exhibit. It was quite obvious from looking at the sizes of the male and female kidneys why there is always a longer line for the female bathrooms. Heh. :-P
My favorite part was the last room, which had unborn babies and pregnant women. All the babies and women had died for other reasons, not just because the scientists wanted them for this exhibit or something. Everyone in the whole exhibit (save the unborn babies) had donated themselves to science for this specific purpose, so nobody was being exploited without their consent. Anyway, they had little tiny babies from 4 weeks old (like 1/10 the size of a pea) up to 6 months. They had a 5-month pregnant woman and another pregnant woman not as far along. They had a bunch of little tubes that showed babies from 4 weeks to 10 weeks, and it was amazing to see how the babies grew from week to week or even during the week (for a few of them, they showed the babies at the beginning, middle, and end of the week). By the 6th week or so, you could definitely see that the baby was a human with human parts. You could even see it at 4 weeks, but not distinctly. So small but so fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wow.
Rachael, I'm sure you would have loved to see this part of the exhibit (and Meg, I know you would have loved it all!). You could find the age of your little one and see what he/she looks like. :-)
One thing that was terribly sad was that there was this little boy, about 3rd grade, who was visiting with his mother. He was looking at the 4-10 week old babies in the tubes, and he said, "Mommy, are those babies?!" She replied, "No, they are fetuses." The boy asked what a fetus was. The mom said, "They are going to turn into babies later, but they aren't babies yet." It was sad. :-( I have no idea how people could think that little being, smaller than a pea, yet with arms and legs and fingers and even a heart could not be a human.
Randy said quite a few times while we were there, "These are babies. There is no way they cannot be babies!" There is no way. Life and humanity most positively begin at conception.
It was a happy thing that the 3rd grade boy, even though his mother tried to indoctrinate him, kept referring to the "fetuses" as babies. He couldn't help it. And neither could anyone else who was looking at them at that time. Everyone kept saying "baby" when referring to them. Shapeless blobs of tissues they were not. I was especially glad to see teenage guys and girls looking at these exhibits and realizing the "fetuses" were babies. People need to know the truth. Perhaps it will guide their future actions.
At the end of the exhibit there were a bunch of books where you could leave your comments about the whole exhibit. I read through a bunch of pages, wondering what people had to say. There were a few entries that stood out, mainly the ones that said things like, "There is no way I couldn't believe in God after seeing all this."
Absolutely no way.