Russell Working

Chicago Tribune

July 31, 2005 Sunday

SHOCK VALUE;

GUNTHER VON HAGENS HAS OUTRAGED CRITICS WITH MACABRE PUBLICITY STUNTS TO PROMOTE "BODY WORLDS" AND LURE 17 MILLION VISITORS TO THE EXHIBITS WORLDWIDE. IT'S ALL IN THE SERVICE OF SCIENCE, HE SAYS.

BYLINE: By Russell Working. Working is a Tribune staff reporter. rworking@tribune.com

Just past the skinless cadavers posed riding a bicycle and dribbling a basketball, two final stops await visitors leaving the Museum of Science and Industry's "Body Worlds" exhibition. On the left is information on how to donate your body to Gunther von Hagens, the German anatomist who created the show of plastic-infused organs and corpses. To the right are guest books where thousands of tourists, medical students, teachers and schoolchildren have reflected on their sojourn among the dead.

"I got to touch a real liver and lung. EWWW!" one girl wrote. "But it was cool. This is an awesome exhibit." Another guest observed: "Being a physician, I can truly appreciate the work it took to prepare the bodies as displayed. It never ceases to amaze me how God is able to create such a magnificent machine."

Only a few were troubled by what they had seen. "You people disgust me with the way you play with dead peoples' bodies," wrote one visitor.

Another wondered "under what circumstances you acquired [a] specimen; that is, the woman that was in the eighth month of pregnancy. That was fascinating but I hope it was acquired ethically."

Von Hagen, who says his life's passion is to "democratize anatomy" by revealing the body's inner workings to the general public, insists that all his "Body Worlds" specimens are donors who consented to be put on display. Yet he has been dogged by scandals in countries where anatomists legally may obtain unclaimed bodies but where corruption and legal abuses are commonplace.

In Russia, a medical examiner was convicted in June of providing corpses of homeless Siberians, prison inmates and the mentally ill to a medical academy that allegedly exported them to von Hagens in Heidelberg, a charge von Hagens denies. Last year, after critics alleged that he had received the bodies of executed prisoners from China, he cremated them rather than use them in his work.

Von Hagens, who says he entrusted local partners to acquire the cadavers and insists that all were legally documented, has been cleared by German prosecutors of accusations he illegally obtained bodies abroad. But that hasn't quieted the controversy and protests that have greeted his exhibits almost from the beginning.

Indeed, he often courts controversy. "On the one hand, I need and I enjoy sensationalism, because sensationalism means curiosity," explains the 60-year-old von Hagens. "And this curiosity brings people to museums and to sports places. But I have to be careful that sensationalism doesn't . . . overweigh the real interest in the human body."

Showmanship has competed with science since he first began his touring exhibitions of flayed cadavers in 1995. He sent the corpse of a pregnant woman-her torso cut open to reveal the fetus-on a bus ride around Berlin to promote "Body Worlds." The city's Jewish leader compared the exhibits to the lampshades made from human skin at Nazi death camps. Churches held requiems for the dead. In Mannheim, the German Anatomical Society tried to block "Body Worlds" from opening in 1997.

The sound and fury didn't cause von Hagens to tone down his approach; on the contrary, he launched projects guaranteed to draw outrage, displaying his "specimens" in a London Planet Hollywood, a cinema and tents in a square near Cologne Cathedral. While his critics fumed, hundreds of thousands of Germans flocked to his exhibitions.

In Britain, he defied threats of prosecution and held an autopsy before a paying audience in a London art gallery. In Edinburgh, Scotland, the city council refused him permission to display corpses in the town's Princes Street Garden during an annual arts festival.

But now, with the opening of his work in the United States-"Body Worlds" premiered in Los Angeles last summer--von Hagens seems to have made a new beginning. His respectful reception here is evident in the display of "Body Worlds" at such prestigious educational venues as the Museum of Science and Industry, the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland and the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

Ethicists and clergymen have endorsed "Body Worlds" or helped museums prepare educational material for the show. New York University's College of Dentistry has asked von Hagens-who invented the process of polymer infusion of bodies known as "plastination"-to design a non-dissection anatomy curriculum using his corpses as educational models.

The U.S. news media also have been less bruising than journalists abroad. While British and German newspapers have labeled von Hagens "Dr. Death" and "Dr. Frankenstein," the Akron Beacon Journal said he was trying "to illuminate the physiology and help us mere mortals grasp the anatomical elegance of the species." The Tribune called it "an informational and aesthetic triumph," and Tribune Co.'s WGN Radio posed a von Hagens corpse titled "The Teacher" in its Michigan Avenue window in April. There were no protests from the tourists and downtown workers who paused to stare.

Why the more favorable reception here? "Americans are a very body-conscious people," von Hagens says. "Health is a big issue. And they're curious people."

The Museum of Science and Industry is expecting 500,000 visitors by the time the exhibit ends on Sept. 5 , and it will rank among its best-attended shows. (The Titanic holds the record, drawing more than 850,000 people in 2000.)

Despite the controversies-or perhaps because of them-"Body Worlds" is big business. The exhibitions have been visited by 17 million people and grossed $200 million worldwide since 1995, and as many as nine rival shows have popped up. Von Hagens has gone to court in an attempt to stop two of them, arguing that his plastinated bodies are protected by copyright laws. He has won one case against an exhibition in Taiwan and exchanged lawsuits with another competitor in Cleveland.

Perhaps his greatest challenger is Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions Inc., which is experienced in global exhibition tours and in scrapping with rivals in court. Known for salvaging artifacts from the Titanic's remains in the North Atlantic and sending them on worldwide tours, Premier has an exhibition of plastinated corpses called "Bodies Revealed" in Seoul and is planning more.

As he prepares to launch a third "Body Worlds" next year, von Hagens is counting on his promotional skills and the public's curiosity about what lies beneath their skin to keep the crowds coming and hold his position in the market. But his penchant for sensationalism-he has considered posing two of his plastinates having sex-may again leave him open to the charge that he is less an educator and scientist than a sideshow pitchman exploiting the dead for profit.

GUNTHER VON HAGENS was born Gunther Liebchen on Jan. 10, 1945, in territory that was then German but today is part of Poland, according to "Pushing the Limits," a biography edited by his second wife and business partner, Dr. Angelina Whalley, 45. (He later took the surname of his first wife, who was tired of being teased about "Liebchen," which means "little darling.")

His father, Gerhard Liebchen, was a former bank clerk and miller. But during the war, he was a sergeant in the Nazi SS, a matter that would later come to haunt his son. When the boy was 5 days old, his family fled the advancing Red Army, and he grew up in East Germany.

Von Hagens suffers from hemophilia, the disorder that can cause uncontrollable bleeding from minor injuries. He spent a lonely childhood teased by other children because he was unable to play rough games, Whalley writes. When he was 6, he suffered a nearly fatal head injury and spent 11 months in the hospital. At one point a physician told the boy he was going to die.

It was during his hospital stay that von Hagens first became interested in anatomy, he says. As he watched the doctors and nurses, he noted their intense interest in the bodies of the children in the ward-checking pulses, listening through stethoscopes. "And so I came to the conclusion that the body must be very, very interesting," he says.

It must have taken courage-or a defiant bravado-for a young hemophiliac to pursue a career that requires him to work with a scalpel. Von Hagens recalls dissecting beetles as a schoolboy, and by the time he was 14, he had dissected a calf at an uncle's farm. At 17, he witnessed his first human autopsy.

He began his medical studies in East Germany, but after protesting against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he attempted to flee the country. He was arrested and spent two years in prison, according to Whalley's biography.

After his release, he finished medical school in the West, and in 1976 he began an 18-year career as a resident and lecturer at the Institute of Pathology and the Institute for Anatomy at the University of Heidelberg.

In 1977, he developed the technologies for forced infusion of anatomical specimens with reactive plastics. Plastination had obvious practical uses for medicine: Generations of medical students could view a lung scarred by a tubercular lesion or blackened by smoking, without the need for new cadavers. A plastinated corpse could also be sliced into horizontal or vertical slabs, allowing a look at a cross section that resembles an MRI. Von Hagens supplies human parts to medical institutions around the world in addition to his "Body Worlds" exhibits.

Von Hagens met Whalley when she signed up for one of his anatomy courses. (Because their first encounter was in the institute's dissection room, a British tabloid later dubbed her "the bride of Frankenstein.") In a chapter of the book, subtitled "Love at Second Sight," she describes her surprise at falling for the anatomist.

He wasn't exactly handsome, she writes. He was pale, with dark rings under his eyes, and he wore Birkenstock sandals, faded shirts and worn-out jeans stiffened with stains from his plastination process. He was consumed by his work. But his intense drive, mixed with a spirit of playfulness, won over the young woman.

"He was like a colorful crazy bird, who at the same time seemed to have incredible strength and unlimited energy," Whalley writes.

In his work, von Hagens began placing corpses in playful poses, following a long tradition in anatomy for approaching the macabre with a whimsy that can shock laypersons. Seventeenth and 18th Century anatomists sketched corpses holding their skin like a castoff raincoat or flipping it up like a veil, says Michael Sappol, curator-historian at the National Library of Medicine. Frederik Ruysch, a Dutch anatomist who lived from 1638 to 1731, arranged fetal and infant skeletons in dioramas in which they played violins or rubbed their eyes as if weeping over their deaths.

Von Hagens began a body-donation program as early as 1983 and now claims he has a list of 6,300 people worldwide who have offered their bodies. He has received 320 of them so far, he says, and some future donors have demonstrated in support his work against critics. One group showed up at a mass in Berlin holding signs that read, "Donating one's body is not a sin."

As he built up the collection in Heidelberg, he began to plastinate figures that comprised parts of more than one individual donor. "I do that with the consent of our donors," he says. "And when I have, for example, a body which needs a heart, then I have no problem to transplant the heart from one body to another one, because it's what is done in real life."

He was asked about the reclining pregnant woman now exhibited at the Museum of Science and Industry. Is the child exposed in her open womb that of the original body donor, or has someone else's fetus been planted within her?

"When it comes to specific specimens, I don't comment on this or that specimen, what I did there and what I did not [do] there," he says. "With this woman, I promised the husband not to give any details. So [if] I would start, as you can imagine, where does it end?"

In the mid-1990s, he began expanding his work abroad. He became a visiting professor at a university in Dalian, in northeastern China, and director of the Plastination Center at the State Medical Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

He and Whalley mounted their first traveling exhibition of bodies in 1995 at the invitation of the Japanese Anatomical Society. The show ran for three years, drawing 2.9 million people. In 1997, they opened another exhibition in Mannheim, Germany. Because the Japanese show had been so well-received, they were unprepared for the outrage they encountered from church leaders and the German Anatomical Society, who questioned von Hagens' medical ethics.

"In Germany it's different because of the German Nazi past, where everything that touches the body and ethics is very hotly discussed," von Hagens says.

In 2002, he sold tickets at $19 apiece for what was reported to be the United Kingdom's first public autopsy in 170 years. The donor was a 72-year-old German alcoholic. Von Hagens removed the organs and displayed them on stainless-steel trays for assistants to show the audience. The event was filmed and later broadcast on television. (The corpse is now part of the "Body Worlds 2" show in Cleveland, von Hagens says.)

A year later, he issued a public appeal in Britain seeking a terminally ill volunteer who would donate his body to a "Futurehuman" project. After the donor's death, a TV station planned to film his plastination and reconstruction as a "Futurehuman" with "improvements" to correct what von Hagens considered flaws in human evolutionary design. The knees would be redesigned to bend backwards to reduce stress, for example, and features would be added, such as a double heart and extra ribs.

British religious leaders denounced the idea as "voyeurism disguised as science."

As he considered the project, von Hagens phoned S. Jay Olshansky, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to discuss a Scientific American article Olshansky had written that fancifully suggested some redesigns in human anatomy. The UIC professor says the idea wasn't intended as a call for action, and he was surprised to learn that he had been listed as a scientific adviser to the project.

"It sounded a bit odd," he says. "Why would you have to have somebody who was alive, and then transform them after death? I didn't see the need to fiddle with a human at all. You could do it with images."

In the end, no appropriate volunteers were found, von Hagens says.

Controversy erupted again last February when a newspaper revealed the Nazi past of his elderly father, who was serving as project leader of a new corpse-preparation factory von Hagens planned in Poland. The articles alleged that Gerhard Liebchen had sent 60 Poles to a concentration camp. Von Hagens told reporters he was unaware of his father's past and denied that he had sent any people to their deaths. Liebchen agreed to resign from the project nonetheless.

Von Hagens' greatest controversies, however, have centered on questions about how he obtained corpses abroad. While whole-body specimens in "Body Worlds" are those of donors, Von Hagens says, he also buys anatomical collections from museums. And for years he accepted unclaimed bodies according to the laws of a given country, as long as they were accompanied by proper documentation. Many nations allow anatomists to do this, but a series of scandals forced him to discontinue the practice, he says.

In June, Vladimir Novosyolov, chief of the regional forensic bureau in Novosibirsk, was convicted and fined $1,222 for providing 51 corpses to a medical academy that allegedly exported them to von Hagens between 1999 and 2001. Prosecutor Denis Kislitsyn says relatives of eight people who had died in mental hospitals and other institutions were told that their loved ones' bodies had been cremated. The survivors were charged a fee to recover what they were told were the ashes of their relatives, but Kislitsyn says the bodies had been sent to von Hagens' institute in Heidelberg.

Von Hagens says he never met or worked with Novosyolov, and there is no proof that bodies Novosyolov acquired were sent to Heidelberg. Von Hagens calls the prosecution politically motivated.

Kislitsyn, in turn, considers the sentence a slap on the wrist. "Society is not ready to deal with this kind of crime," he says. Novosyolov is appealing the conviction.

The acquisition of cadavers in China sparked a public furor last year when a German magazine published what it said was e-mail from an employee at von Hagens' Dalian facility boasting that it had obtained "fresh specimens"-a young man and woman who had died that morning. Both allegedly had bullet holes in their heads, suggesting they were executed. A total of seven in the Dalian facility had head injuries.

Von Hagens says the bodies were obtained from universities and that the injuries did not appear to be gunshot wounds. It is unlikely they were executed prisoners, he says, but he could not disprove that, so he cremated the bodies rather than use them. Prosecutors in Heidelberg later ruled that the corpses had been provided to his company legally.

Yet another corpse-acquisition scandal emerged in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, a Muslim nation where the dead are revered and relatives build monumental graves in cemeteries that sprawl like adobe cities across the hills near every village. The mud-brick mausoleums resemble small mansions, fortresses or mosques, sometimes painted with portraits of the deceased.

But there is a vulnerable population in Kyrgyzstan: prisoners, mental-asylum inmates and impoverished people who die in hospitals. Two years ago, Akbokon Tashtanbekov, then a member of parliament, began hearing complaints from his constituents about missing relatives.

Tashtanbekov said in a recent phone interview that he didn't believe the stories at first, but he visited the Kyrgyz State Medical Academy in Bishkek, where bodies were prepared at the plastination center. Employees told him the bosses were away and denied him entry. Then one night as he was passing the academy, he saw that the lights were on inside. He climbed through a window and found himself in a morgue with 110 barrels of human organs and 217 entire corpses stored in refrigerators or immersed in special basins. Tashtanbekov halted the work and sealed off the building to stop employees from removing anything.

According to his figures, the academy had obtained more than 800 dead bodies from prisons, psychiatric wards and hospitals, which hadn't always notified the families. Eighteen or 19 children were among them, Tashtanbekov says. "The oldest was 6 years old; the youngest one was only 14 hours old." Prisons allegedly sold bodies for $13 to $15 apiece.

One Kyrgyz resident, Raisa Gerasimenko, will never know what became of her son, Dmitry. Gerasimenko, 65, said in a telephone interview that she received a telegram in 1998 from a psychiatric hospital stating that her brain-damaged son had died. When she tried to pick up the body, she was told it had been sent to the medical academy.

"I was asking them, 'Please give me at least one of his bones, and I'll bury it next to my husband. I'll be crying there for both of them.' But I've gotten nothing."

Another missing body is that of Kishinbek Mamakiev, a 71-year-old resident of Bishkek. One night in 2000, he collapsed in the street from a brain hemorrhage while out for a walk, says his brother, Narynbai. He died in a hospital.

His family, however, weren't told of his fate, Narynbai says. They spent three years visiting hospitals and morgues and even placing ads on television. Then, in 2003, they received a call from Tashtanbekov, who said he had found Kishinbek Mamakiev's name in the morgue of the medical academy's plastination center.

"They took some organs from him and then they buried him, together with another 10 or 20 discarded people," says Narynbai.

One Kyrgyz official told reporters that about a third of the specimens provided by Kyrgyz psychiatric hospitals went to "Body Worlds," and others claim to recognize Kyrgyz features in some of the short-statured figures in "Body Worlds." Von Hagens says all exhibition bodies are those of donors, and 90 percent are German.

Von Hagens also says he had nothing to do with procuring the bodies in Kyrgyzstan-local officials and the anatomy department handled that-and all the bodies came with legal documentation. In 2001, long before the scandal erupted publicly, he cut off relations with Valery Gabitov, head of the academy's department of anatomical pathology, and he has set up a separate body donor program in Kyrgyzstan to better control where corpses come from.

This year, a Kyrgyz court convicted four academy employees of "abuse of power" in the case. Gabitov received a suspended sentence of two years.

Following up on media reports, German prosecutors investigated the corpse acquisition and concluded that von Hagen had not illegally obtained any bodies in Kyrgyzstan and China.

Mindful of these controversies, the California Science Center in Los Angeles formed an ethics committee before "Body Worlds" arrived in Los Angeles last year and sent an investigator to Heidelberg to check on the origins of the specimens. He determined that all bodies were those of volunteer donors, says Rabbi Morley T. Feinstein, who served on the committee. The panel also made sure that none of the bodies came from the Nazi era, he says, eliminating the possibility that any of them could have been Holocaust victims.

Before the show arrived in Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry assembled a committee of educators and clergy to consider how to help families and students sensitively discuss the topic, says David Mosena, the museum's president and CEO.

He believes the exhibition has succeeded in enlightening visitors. "There are thousands of people here every day quietly buzzing about what they're seeing, and being fascinated with it: 'I didn't realize this.' 'Oh, look at that.' 'We'd better start taking better care of ourselves because of this,' [and] 'Oh, my gosh, this must be what happened to Uncle Henry.' "

DESPITE VON HAGENS' difficulties, other entrepreneurs smell profits in the cadaver-exhibition business. Last year his former manager, Sui Hongjin, launched a copycat exhibition in Beijing, also called "Body Worlds."

By various counts, as many as 11 shows of plastinated cadavers have appeared in Asia, Europe and the United States in recent years. In addition to von Hagens' and Sui's "Body Worlds," there are Premier's "Bodies Revealed" in Seoul, "Body Exploration" in Taiwan, "The Universe Within" in San Francisco, "Mysteries of the Human Body" in South Korea and an apparently unrelated exhibition in Japan titled "Jintai Plastomic: Mysteries of the Human Body." In Spain, several universities have produced an exhibition of plastinated human remains titled "Cuerpos entra--ables" or "Intimate Bodies."

Like "Body Worlds," many of the rival shows involve figures in striking, often athletic poses, such as those of soccer players and discus throwers. And like von Hagens, others have been accused of questionable body-acquisition methods.

"The Universe Within," the San Francisco show, was mounted by a Chinese anatomist from Beijing Medical University and his Austrian partners, according to organizers. A television station reported that the bodies weren't from Beijing University, as the Austrian promoter had claimed, but from an unnamed factory in Nanjing. A factory spokesman who identified herself only as Miss Liu said the company provides plastinates to medical institutions. She didn't know if they ended up in exhibitions after that.

Chinese-Americans began protesting the San Francisco show, and unlike von Hagens, organizers could not defuse the anger by claiming that the bodies were those of donors. Fiona Ma, a member of the San Francisco board of supervisors, called for a ban on such exhibitions if the bodies are not documented as donors who agreed to be displayed in for-profit shows.

"In the Chinese culture they have great respect for the dead and superstition about dead bodies and death. And so I know they would never consent to have their bodies displayed like this, in such a manner," says Ma. "It's really kind of disgusting. The bodies are all chopped up. The skin is all flaring out."

Media accounts, court records and import documents indicate that most of "Body Worlds" rivals use corpses from China. One reason for China's growing dominance in the plastination of cadavers, says Sui, the former von Hagens employee, is that dissection is emphasized in Chinese medical education and there are many skilled anatomists there.

But Harry Wu, executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation in Washington, suggests another reason: "Cadavers are cheap in China." This is no surprise in a country that has been accused of selling the organs of executed prisoners for transplants, Wu says, adding that he has posed as a middleman to uncover organ-selling schemes.

Von Hagens has often chosen art galleries as settings for his shows, and his donors are asked to affirm the statement, "I agree that my body can be used for an anatomical work of art." This concept of posed bodies as a kind of intellectual property has provided the basis for his use of copyright law against rivals.

His lawyers filed a complaint against "Body Exploration" in Taiwan, and police there raided the exhibition in Taichung in May, seizing six cadavers and threatening the organizers with prosecution. In one specimen, the makers of the body copied everything in a similar figure of von Hagens' right down to a knee replacement, said attorney John Eastwood.

"If you think about other natural materials in any other kind of three-dimensional work, like a statue, if you carved it out of wood, the wood itself is not what you're copyrighting. It's what you've done to the wood," he said in a telephone interview from Taipei. "In this case, with another natural substance, the human body, it's not just an artistic work-you could consider it that-but it's also a scientific and educational work."

Premier Exhibitions, which has an aggressive plan to promote touring exhibitions, isn't buying such arguments. "From what we've seen so far, he doesn't really have any copyrights that would stop other people from medically dissecting a human body for exhibition," says Premier president Arnie Geller. "And every body is different and every person is different, and so what are we talking about?"

Premier spent $7 million and won numerous lawsuits defending its position as sole salvager of the Titanic wreckage, and says it is prepared to defend "Bodies Revealed." The company has filed a lawsuit against von Hagens in Cleveland, charging he elbowed its "Bodies Revealed" out of a planned venue this year at the Great Lakes Science Center through a whispering campaign "questioning the legitimacy of Premier's acquisitions of bodies" and threatening to open a rival show nearby.

Premier has no body-donation program, but it stated that its Chinese cadavers were obtained legally from a Chinese government-approved facility and the U.S. specimens came from the University of Michigan pathology department. (The university confirmed that it provided specimens from an old educational exhibit scheduled for cremation to a retired Michigan professor who serves as chief medical adviser to Premier.)

Geller accuses von Hagens of damaging his relation with the Cleveland museum. "He knows what has hurt him in the past, and he's reaching into his bag of tricks hoping to try to hurt somebody else," Geller says.

Von Hagens says he never trades in rumors, but admits he does hand people newspaper articles. "And whether its true or not, even I don't say." People can draw their own conclusions, he adds.

In an echo of the Taiwan charges, von Hagens responded to Premier with a lawsuit in U.S. District Court accusing Premier of copyright violations by imitating his "signature works." Premier has since announced that it was dropping its case in order to respond to von Hagens' federal suit.

IN THE END, the accusations against von Hagens and others may resonate because of a sordid side of anatomy's history, says Sappol of the National Library of Medicine. Anatomists once bought corpses from grave robbers, and there were riots against medical schools in the days when paupers were handed over to student doctors to dissect.

In one case, Charles Byrne, known as "the Irish giant" in London, was ailing in 1783 when he learned that an anatomist named John Hunter wanted his corpse. Horrified, Byrne made friends promise to bury him at sea upon his death. But after he died, Hunter bribed an undertaker and he got his prize corpse. Byrne's skeleton now hangs in a London museum.

"The original sin of anatomy was that anatomists took bodies where they wanted to without informed consent," Sappol says. "Clearly, [von Hagens] has now got a long list of people who are lined up around the corner, anxious to donate their bodies to him so that they can be immortalized. But most of those people won't die for 20 or 30 years, and in the meantime, he needs bodies. And when they die, they'll be old. He would rather not have an old body. He'd rather have a young body. His early specimens, I don't know what the provenance of those are. I don't think he's ever adequately given an account."

Von Hagens says his donor program, started years before his first show, supplies ample specimens, and that old bodies are actually better than young in providing diseased organs for medical study and displays.

Compared with some of their European brethren, churches in the United States have been quiet about "Body Worlds." But perhaps that may change. Von Hagens recently visited the National Library when it sponsored an exhibition of old anatomical drawings of cadavers, said Sappol, who curated the show. One etching from 1779 depicted a flayed torso being crucified.

According to Sappol, von Hagens was inspired by the possibilities for his own creations. "He said, 'Oh, that's an anatomical Christ on the cross. I think I'll do that.' "