Gunther von Hagens, creator of Body Worlds and plastination, dies aged 81

Gunther von Hagens, who developed a technique for permanently preserving human bodies in rigid states and toured the world with his controversial Body Worlds exhibition, has moved closer to fulfilling a long-held wish to be sliced up and displayed in a museum after dying aged 81.

“It is with deep sadness that the family and the Institute for Plastination announce the passing of Dr Gunther von Hagens, inventor of plastination and creator of the Body Worlds exhibitions,” the German anatomist’s institute said in a statement released on Monday.

Von Hagens, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2008, died in a hospital in Heidelberg on 24 July, a day after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage.

He frequently said he wanted his own body to be preserved after his death, though he wavered on his preferred mode of presentation.

“I could envisage my plastinated body standing in a welcoming pose at the entrance of an exhibition, or rendered into slices and distributed across various sites,” he wrote in the Guardian in 2018.

On Monday, a spokesperson for the Plastinarium – a museum von Hagens founded in Guben, Germany, in 2006 – said the anatomist’s body “will definitely be plastinated, as this was always a long-held wish of his”, though where it would be put on display had not been determined.

Von Hagens was born Gunther Gerhard Liebchen in January 1945 in Skalmierzyce, Poland, then under German occupation and named Alt-Skalden. He grew up in socialist East Germany and took part in protests against the violent Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. The following year, he was imprisoned after trying to flee into the west.

In 1970, West Germany paid 40,000 deutschmarks for him to be released to its care as a political prisoner. In the west, he met and married his first wife, Cornelia von Hagens, adopting her surname and its connotations of nobility.

Von Hagens came up with his technique for preserving bodies in 1977, while working as a research scientist at the University of Heidelberg’s institute of pathology and anatomy. “Looking at specimens embedded in plastic – the most advanced preservation technique then available – I wondered why the plastic was poured around bodies rather than into them,” he wrote in the Guardian.

Plastination involves extracting bodily fluids and soluble fat from a dead body and replacing them with resins, silicon rubbers and epoxies. The technique lends a high degree of rigidity to the tissue, enabling bodies to be displayed in upright, lifelike poses.

From 1995, von Hagens’ plastinated bodies were displayed in travelling exhibitions. Some were sliced up to reveal internal organs, while others were posed playing chess, doing physical exercise or having sex. Called Body Worlds, the displays became a global phenomenon, attracting more than 50 million visitors worldwide.

Von Hagens curated the shows in tandem with his second wife, Angelina Whalley, and said they were driven by a desire to “democratise anatomy” and shatter taboos around death.

But many critics felt the exhibitions deliberately tried to titillate audiences with exhibits such as a series of foetal specimens at various stages of gestation.

The anatomist insisted the bodies displayed in the shows belonged to people who had authorised the use of their bodies after their deaths for educational benefit, though the use of infant and animal bodies raised difficult moral questions.

Von Hagens’ fedora-and-leather-vest wearing public persona – “a cross between evil scientist and the television cliche of ghoulish murder-scene pathologist”, according to one review – may not have helped dispel questions about his motives.

After Parkinson’s disease left him with reduced motor skills and limited speech, von Hagens transferred organisational and financial duties to his wife and son Rurik.

“Sometimes, at this stage of my life and illness, I wish I could suspend my convictions and embrace the idea of a divinity and an afterlife”, he wrote in 2018. “But I don’t think there is a continuum beyond death. Every deceased body I have seen has shown me the absence of the soul. I don’t believe anything is left of us after we die.”