Image: Screenshot of “International Federation of Associations of Anatomists” home page. Body Worlds Exhibit San Diego 2009, Wikimedia Commons Attribution.
Peak Anatomists’ Federation Reminder that Commercial Plastinated Corpse Shows Fail Standards, as Body Worlds opens in Sydney
Sydney, 16 September 2026 — As BODY WORLDS: The Anatomy of Happiness prepares to open, we are posting this article as a reminder that in 2017 and 2018 the world’s peak anatomy organisation spoke out against the commercial display of plastinated human remains, saying such exhibitions fail to meet ethical standards
The statement, Ethical and Medical Humanities Perspectives on the Public Display of Plastinated Human Bodies, was issued by the Federative International Committee for Ethics and Medical Humanities (FICEM) of the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists (IFAA).
What the anatomists actually said
From the mid-1990s, for-profit companies have put dissected, plastinated bodies into “life-like” poses and charged the public to look at them. The first of those shows, the committee notes, was German anatomist Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds.
While they attract large crowds, IFAA notes that “the display of dead bodies engenders ethical, cultural and legal questions”
In 2017 they published Recommendations of Good Practice for the Donation and Study of Human Bodies and Tissues for Anatomical Examination.
A discussion of the details of these aspects can be summarised here:
- Consent must be individual, written and specific. “Donation” by a university, a police bureau or a “community” is not donation. The dead person must have agreed, in life, to public display — including the poses, the permanence of plastination, and the fact that the body may never be buried. Shows that cannot meet that standard is “unacceptable.”
- Every specimen must be traceable to a named donor. Transparency is mandatory when bodies or parts have crossed borders.
- The dead body is not merchandise. “The dead human body should not be made an object of commerce.” If the main purpose is financial gain, such as high door charges, a for-profit operator, “it must be deemed unethical.”
- Education is not a free pass. FICEM questions whether the draw is anatomy or morbid curiosity, and whether theatrical poses (including sexualised ones) are more voyeuristic than educational. Historical pageantry, such as placing the impresario in a line from Vesalius to Rembrandt’s Dr Tulp, does not make a modern commercial practice ethical, “because modern ethics has evolved.”
- Dignity and privacy survive death. Identifiable marks should not be shown. Relatives matter. Calling a person a “plastinate” and treating the body as raw material for art or design is, in the committee’s words, “de-humanising.”
They conclude that “the commercial public display of human remains appears not to meet the ethical standards established by the committee and endorsed by the IFAA.” Consent, even if genuine, is described as necessary but not sufficient. A paid public spectacle can still fail.
Two exhibitions, one Chinese origin story
Our past work has focused on “bodies” shows supplied from Dalian, China and Dalian Hoffen Bio-Technique, the company built by von Hagens’ former Dalian manager, Professor Sui Hongjin, and toured by Premier Exhibitions and later Imagine Exhibitions.
Those shows are the ones that carried the notorious disclaimer that the remains were “originally received by the Chinese Bureau of Police,” that Chinese police “may receive bodies from Chinese prisons,” and that the promoter “cannot independently verify” that visitors are not looking at people who died in custody. Premier’s own FAQ still could not close that gap (see HERE).
In April 2015 about 250 people protested Bodies Revealed at Niagara Falls. Lawyer Joel Etienne told the crowd there were “credible allegations that the bodies on display may have been the bodies of human rights [activists] who were murdered by the authorities for their political or spiritual beliefs.” Ontario MPP Jack MacLaren called the trade “heinous.”
In 2018, when Real Bodies opened at Sydney’s Entertainment Quarter, lawyers, academics and ethicists published an open letter urging the Australian government to shut it down. Tom Zaller, then CEO of Imagine Exhibitions, had said the bodies were “absolutely from China,” but said there was “no documentation” to prove their identities or show they had agreed in life to donate their corpses in death. The letter set out the evidence that “unclaimed” Chinese cadavers, delivered for plastination within days of death, were a poor match for a country with almost no voluntary body-donation culture at the time the specimens were processed.
While Body Worlds is not Premier or Imagine, or Hoffen Bio-Technique company, it is run from von Hagens’ Institute for Plastination [Institut für Plastination (IfP)] in Heidelberg (now carried on after his death in July 2026). Organisers say official shows, including The Anatomy of Happiness, use whole-body plastinates from IfP’s donor programme (listed 24,371 registered donors as of April 2026, see HERE).
IfP’s own FAQ says a few organs still come from old anatomical collections.
Where did the specimens on display come from? Will we know who the plastinates are or how they died?
The BODY WORLDS exhibitions rely on the generosity of body donors; individuals who bequeathed that, upon their death, their bodies could be used for educational purposes in the exhibition. All the whole-body plastinates and the majority of the specimens are from these body donors; a few organs and specific specimens that show unusual conditions come from old anatomical collections and morphological institutes. As agreed upon by the body donors, their identities and causes of death are not disclosed. The exhibition focuses on the nature of our bodies, not on providing personal information.
Why the IFAA paper still matters this week
Body Worlds arrives in Sydney framed as health education of happiness, brain disease, an “Anatomical Mirror,” with tickets from $35, and more than 270,000 people already saw the Australian tour in Brisbane, Perth and Melbourne (Time Out, 2026).
The IFAA objection is not only questioning whether the bodies displayed were murdered, but also that even with paperwork, a for-profit public display of posed dead bodies commercialises the corpse, freezes the person in a permanent spectacle, and teaches a mechanical view of the body that anatomy as a discipline has spent a generation trying to leave behind. Modern anatomy teaching has moved toward treating the donor as a person — memorial services, ceremonies around dissection courses — while plastination exhibits usually do the opposite, where the dead are “just ‘plastinates’,” which they call de-humanising / de-personalising.
Whereas for-profit plastination companies anonymize, objectify, and commodify the human body, the new ethos of anatomy education is focused on the shared humanity of body donors, learners, and educators.
If a show cannot trace every specimen to a freely given, display-specific consent, it should not clear Australian customs or an Australian venue. That rule would have stopped Real Bodies in 2018. It is also the rule FICEM says every commercial plastination exhibit, including the original, has to meet.
