Jim Kershner: Our bodies are far from being ‘grody’

As I wandered through a Seattle exhibition hall, gawking at human bodies that were not just naked, but skinned and dissected and in some cases bisected, the thought crossed my mind: When it comes to bodies, attitudes have certainly changed since I was growing up.

When I was a teenager, the body was a lot like the deepest Congo: A strange, exotic, mysterious land, full of dark wonders and hidden perils. And just like the Congo, most of us had never even glimpsed this legendary land, much less gone on safari through it.

And we teens weren’t the only ignorant ones. In my parent’s generation, many people made it to their wedding nights before seeing a complete, unencumbered body of the opposite sex. And that was usually with the lights off. They certainly weren’t paying $24.50 a pop to stare inside a cadaver.

Yet here I was at “Bodies: The Exhibition,” along with kids, teens and grandmas, staring with fascination at, to name just a few selected items, a rectum, a nasal passage, a testicle, a patella and an appendix.

“Bodies: The Exhibition,” which will run at least through the end of the year across the street from the Seattle Convention Center at 800 Pike Street, is the first regional appearance of an emerging modern fad: The Cavalcade of Cadavers. These “Bodies” exhibits consist of cadavers that have been specially preserved – plasticized, you might say – and then splayed open for our enjoyment. If you’ve caught “Casino Royale” you’ve seen what I’m talking about. One scene takes place in a “Bodies” exhibit. James Bond and company cavort through a veritable sculpture garden of corpses, until one of the live characters is converted to corpse-dom as well.

But this cultural shift did not begin with “Bodies.” It began with “CSI.” Have you ever stopped to marvel at how a TV show that, essentially, revels in dead bodies, got to be the No. 1 show in America? In order to understand the enormity of this attitude change, all you have to do is imagine how this would have played in the 1960s or 1970s:

“This week on ‘Marcus Welby, M.D.,’ the kindly Dr. Welby digs up a cadaver and hacks it to pieces.”

“Tomorrow on ‘Ben Casey,’ Dr. Zorba does an autopsy and immerses himself elbow-deep!”

“Tonight on ‘Dr. Kildare,’ the handsome young doctor performs a colonoscopy. We’ll stick our cameras up there!”

How can I explain this change to those of you in the “CSI” generation? Americans in those days would have found this to be disgusting, shocking, deeply unpleasant, gross, and, to use a term my cousin applied to anything relating to any body part or function, “Grody.”

Of course, a few people in that generation did find it fascinating and they tended to be people headed to medical or nursing school. I happened to marry one of them, and I still think it’s just slightly strange that her idea of a good time is to watch an autopsy. Yet thank goodness these people didn’t find the body “grody” or we’d have some pretty lousy medical care today.

Here’s one good reason they didn’t find the body “grody.” It’s not.

I admit to some trepidation when I walked into “Bodies: The Exhibition.” I was afraid my stomach might churn or the blood might drain from my head. What actually happened was that I was too busy admiring the actual reality of a stomach – so small! how did I possibly stuff an entire pizza in there! – to worry about it churning. I was too busy admiring the lacework of veins and arteries in the brain to get light-headed.

The lesson I took from “Bodies: The Exhibition” was this: The more we see of the body, the less mysterious it becomes. The less mysterious it becomes, the less neurotic we have to be about it. I’m not saying that all knowledge is necessarily good – I wish we knew less about H-bombs – but I am convinced that the more we know about the body, the better off we are.

“Bodies” brings up other ethical issues as well, the main one concerning where these bodies came from (China) and whether the, umm, stars of the show had given their wholehearted consent.

I’m on the fence about that, but not about the healthy results of this cultural shift. Let me put it this way: I had never seen an actual appendix before I went to this exhibit, despite the fact that mine had been causing trouble for years. For the first time I saw that an item that had achieved mythical proportions in my inflamed imagination was just a tiny finger of tissue, hanging there, doing nothing. It may be useless, but it wasn’t grody.