Warwick University expects more than 200 human body parts to arrive next week. You might think that wasn’t out of the ordinary, but this time there’s a twist.

The institution’s medical school has purchased “plastinated” teaching aids costing £400 000 from the controversial Gunther von Hagens. Von Hagens, who works out of Guben, Germany, is famous for carting exhibitions of preserved and carefully chopped up dead folks around the world, occasionally displaying them riding dissected horses or playing chess (press release).

Warwick’s anatomy students will be under strict orders on how to handle the expensive flesh, which should stay in one piece (or however many pieces are intended) for about a decade, according to the university press office. Head of department Peter Abrahams, apparently trotted around the workshops of various suppliers, testing their embalmed bits before agreeing to the deal with Dr Death (as von Hagens is weirdly proud to be known).

The Telegraph just published a profile of von Hagens and his German factory, with its blood-red floors and 150-odd workers, who boast jobs as peculiar as preparing Santa Claus’s lungs.

Intriguingly, the obsessive anatomist was once sold by East Germany to West Germany (West Germany purchased the release of about 30,000 political prisoners from East Germany – Times), and 8,000 people have volunteered to have their corpses dunked in a bath of acetone, injected with silicone rubber and then cured by him or his craftsmen.

https://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4613780.ece

More coverage

University buys £400k body parts – BBC

University buys body parts – PA

Image: Von Hagens with students and parts