This Man Turned Human Corpses Into Popular Museum Displays. Now, the Creator of These Controversial ‘Body Worlds’ Has Donated His Own Body to Science

Gunther von Hagens, who invented plastination, a method of preserving bodies by replacing their natural fluids with polymers, recently died at age 81

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

July 31, 2026 3:56 p.m.

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Just over 30 years ago, Gunther von Hagens premiered “BODY WORLDS,” a museum exhibition full of real, flayed human corpses that were posed and cross-sectioned. The anatomist had prepared the donated bodies through his own technique, “plastination.” He’d switched their natural fluids for resins and elastomers. For this, von Hagens earned the moniker “Doctor Death.”

Von Hagens died in July of a cerebral hemorrhage, after living for years with Parkinson’s disease, reports the Guardian’s Mick O’Hare. He was 81. At von Hagens’ request, his own body will be plastinated.

“Gunther wanted to give people the opportunity to look beneath the skin—not out of sensationalism, but from the deep conviction that knowledge of one’s own body can contribute to a more conscious, healthier, responsible life,” says von Hagens’ wife, curator and physician Angelina Whalley, in a statement from “BODY WORLDS.” “His work was scientific, educational and deeply humanistic. He enabled millions of people to see their own bodies in a new light.”

Von Hagens was born in 1945 in what’s now western Poland, and he began medical school in communist East Germany. In 1970, he migrated to West Germany and continued his studies. As an anatomical assistant at the University of Heidelberg, von Hagens observed specimens preserved inside blocks of clear plastic, and he asked the curator whether the process could be flipped: Why not put the plastic inside the specimen?

“He said, ‘You are an idiot. You cannot do it,’” von Hagens recalled on BBC’s “Friday Night With Jonathan Ross” in 2008. “And this boggled my mind.”

By 1977, von Hagens had created his first plastinated specimen: a kidney. According to “BODY WORLDS,” he realized he’d begun his life’s work. Von Hagens then honed and expanded his methods over time.

The plastination process begins with fixation—pumping formaldehyde through a body’s arteries to get rid of bacteria. Then, the body is dissected, removing skin, fatty and connective tissues. It is then soaked in an acetone bath, which gets rid of water and soluble fats. As von Hagens said on “Jonathan Ross,” “Without water, no decay.” Next, the body is placed in a bath of liquid polymer, like silicone rubber, polyester or epoxy resin. The acetone vaporizes, creating a vacuum, and polymer fills in all the microscopic gaps. Finally, the body is cured. The whole process takes about 1,500 working hours to complete.

The fruits of von Hagens’ labor premiered at Tokyo University in 1995, within the very first “BODY WORLDS” exhibition—a collection of posed plastinated bodies. The exhibition began touring the world, attracting visitors and prompting critiques. In the early 2000s, for example, a rabbi and a novelist compared von Hagens’ work to Nazi crimes, while a reverend said he “plays with the corpses like a child plays with dolls,” per the Associated Press’ Geir Moulson.

An anatomist “is forced in his daily work to reject the taboos and convictions that people have about death and the dead,” von Hagens countered, per the AP. “I touch here a taboo, which is our body, and nothing is so near as our body is to us.”

Still, the traveling exhibition was—and remains—wildly popular. Its organizers report that more than 58 million people have gone to see it, in 42 different countries spanning six continents. There are permanent installations in California, Germany and the Netherlands, and this year, it’s showing temporarily in Melbourne and Sydney inAustralia.

Von Hagens attributed the appeal of “BODY WORLDS” to humans’ curiosity about themselves. “Before the exhibitions, when I used to give lectures, I noticed that the cleaning lady and the doorman were more interested than my colleagues,” he told the Los Angeles Times’ Diane Haithman in 2004. “That is what makes plastination different—they start to identify with the specimens.”

Gunther von Hagens Friday Night with Jonathan Ross

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Fans lauded von Hagens’ apparent appreciation of the human physique. As the New York Times’ Edward Rothstein wrote in a 2013 review, “You are actually seeing the forces of life on display in this dead matter, and those forces are extraordinary.”

Some 22,000 people have registered to donate their body to von Hagens’ program—most of them German—according to “BODY WORLDS.” Von Hagens’ own body is only the latest contribution to plastination, a discipline now practiced in some 400 laboratories around the world.

“My father never accepted that boundaries were fixed,” says von Hagens’ son, Rurik, in the statement. “He brought anatomy out of the closed world of specialists and into society. His courage, his perseverance and his unwavering belief that education serves humanity will continue to guide us.”

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Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.