Anatomy for Beginners

SBS television is currently screening the 4-part series Anatomy for Beginners (SBS Mondays 10.35pm). It makes for amazing viewing, but it's not for the faint-hearted.

***A WARNING: If you are at all squeamish you may want to stop reading now. This post contains descriptions of human anatomical dissection.***

In each episode, famously weird fedora-wearing German anatomist and cadaver plastinator Gunther von Hagens dissects a fresh human body before a live audience, focusing on a particular bodily system. This week it was the digestive system. You may have seen the promo, with Gunther (or was it his Fedora) explaining to ze kamera how he “vill unravel zis vooman's bauwelz from her maus to her anus."

Boy, did he ever. I think the official SBS info describes the action adequately:

Episode 3, Monday, 31 July – Digestion:

Professor von Hagens dissects a woman in front of a live audience to reveal the digestive system. After slicing off the back of her head so that he can demonstrate from behind the passage of a mouthful of food down the oesophagus, he removes her entire abdominal block from her tongue all the way to her anus and, after dissecting all the organs along the digestive tract, he unravels it to its full length of seven metres.

Apparently these are the first ever televised human dissections and the live studio audience includes prospective body donors to Gunther von Hagens' Institute for Plastination.

The final episode is this coming Monday 7 August, where SBS's summary promises:

The Professor dissects a man and a woman in front of a live audience to reveal their reproductive systems. Following the path of the sperm from his testes, along the vas deferens and out of his penis, von Hagens picks up the journey inside the female dissection specimen where he dissects her uterus and finally demonstrates how a baby passes through a female pelvis.

I've seen two of the three episodes screened so far: one featured a formalin-injected fresh cadaver, the other a totally fresh "wet" cadaver. It makes riveting television if you can tolerate the sight of blood and organs and the squelching sound of wet cartilage, tendon and bone being cut, snipped and yanked. Gunther actually uses something resembling a pair of box-cutters for much of the cartilage and bone work.

Alongside the eccentric Gunther -- who enjoys his flesh cutting work just a little more than most would consider seemly -- is Yorkshire pathologist Professor John Lee. Lee is the straight man. He is Dean Martin to Gunther's Jerry Lewis and provides a running commentary on what we are seeing, occasionally walking over to demonstrate on a live nude model who spends each episode on stage having the circulatory, digestive or reproductive system painstakingly colour-drawn on their bare skin by an artist in real time.

This is visceral, gruesome, stomach-churning television, bordering on prurient, yet I can't look away . . .