I remember as a kid going through a museum in Chicago and they had a display of 1/4" thick sliced bodies set in door sized glass plates. They were mounted so you could swing them like shopping for a poster at Target.
The part that struck me was that they were displayed on a large wall along a stair landing between floors. It was just so out of context and kind of sad. They donate their body to science and end up as a transitional space filler.
They were 1/2" slices, actually. That was the 1/2" Man and Woman Body Slices exhibit. They'd been there since the 1940s I think, but they moved them out a few years ago when the BodyWorlds exhibit was put in. I don't know if they ever came back.
The man was sliced horizontally and the woman was sliced vertically.
It was pretty close to the exhibit of 9 months of miscarried human embryos and fetuses in jars if I remember correctly.
> They donate their body to science and end up as a transitional space filler.
I wouldn't mind ending up like this. While my body may not go on to help someone cure cancer, it's definitely educational for children to peer inside the body, for a short a time as you could spend on a stairwell.
Besides - my kids would (hopefully) hear of me travelling around the world, or perhaps stuck in the back of a dusty vault of some museum. Better that than being stuck in a hole in the ground.
The part that struck me was that they were displayed on a large wall along a stair landing between floors. It was just so out of context and kind of sad. They donate their body to science and end up as a transitional space filler.