If anyone saw "Anatomy for Beginners" last Monday night on SBS, they would have seen a wacky German 'Doctor' carving his way through the nether regions of a male and female cadaver in the name of science. It was like an evil/horror version of 'How Stuff Works'. Our testicular tour guide for the evening was Dr Gunther von Hagens.

Now, I dunno whether it was the hat that he was sporting, or his blue jump suit, but this guy looked like he'd just stepped off the set of 'Wolf Creek' or 'Hostel'. Having sat through both of those films comfortably, I thought sitting through an hour long dissection would be a breeze. I was wrong. Dead wrong! In the first minutes I saw the Doc slice open the cadavers testicle, peel it like a kiwi fruit, squish its contents around between his fingers, and pull out some tube like stuff. When he took the scissors out and started cutting and peeling his way up to the belly button I had to turn it off, and go back to playing 'Outlaw Golf' on the Xbox.
However, I remained curious. Not about the procedure, but more so about what sort of person could run with a dissection as modern day freak show. So I google'd the good Dr Gunther von Hagens. His bio/background is even more interesting than his wide brimmed hat. Here are a few interesting tidbits:

1. Gunther is a hemophiliac and spent six months in hospital after cutting himself;
2. He invented a plastination procedure to preserve human bodies and body parts, and then created an exhibition called 'Body Worlds' to show off his 'exhibits';
3. In 2002 he performed the first public autopsy in the UK for 170 years, to a sell-out audience of 500 people in a London theatre;
4. He always wears his wide brimmed black fedora in public or when 'performing' (is he the German Dr Death version of Molly Meldrum?);
5. There were legal proceedings against von Hagens in Siberia regarding a shipment of 56 corpses to Heidelberg;
6. In October 2003, a parliamentary committee in Kyrgyzstan investigated accusations that von Hagens had illegally received and plastinated several hundred corpses from prisons, psychiatric institutions and hospitals in Kyrgyzstan, some without prior notification of the families.
7. In January 2004, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that von Hagens had acquired some corpses from executed prisoners in China. He countered that he did not know the origin of the bodies and went on to cremate several of the disputed cadavers.

A majority of this information came from an article in the Chicago Tribune. Interesting character, not sure I'd invite him around for dinner though.

Now from Doctor Doom, to this interesting story sent to me earlier this week.

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I only have two questions for this guy:

1) how cold was it?; and

2) at what point did it become a good idea to sit around naked?