Discovery Place’s Body Worlds exhibit will make you think about your body, your life and your choices

These used to be real people.

That point is made clear as soon as you walk into the Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibit at Discovery Place uptown and see the large faces projected on the wall.

Everything in the exhibit, which opens Nov. 21, is real. It adds an emotional dimension to the exhibit that a textbook or plastic model won’t give you. This is a real body, like my body. This was a real person, like me.

The bodies and body parts come from about 1,500 people who have died and volunteered their bodies to the exhibit, according to creative and conceptual designer Dr. Angelina Whalley.

In total, more than 15,500 people have agreed to donate their bodies to the exhibit when they die — 25 from North Carolina and six from Charlotte.

But the exhibit didn’t make me think about death. It made me think about how our bodies are beautiful and complicated and amazingly intricate systems.

The bodies are put into active, often athletic poses — a baseball swing, a hockey check, a fencing lunge — and are preserved through a technique developed by von Hagens called plastination. You can read more about that here, but in short plastination stops the decomposition of a deceased body in order to preserve it for educational purposes.

It also made me think about my choices. As a fellow member of the media put it: “This is making me regret every cigarette I ever smoked.”

“It makes people change their minds about themselves and, most importantly, about their lifestyles,” Whalley said. “What you do to a body, it matters.”

The exhibit takes you through the full life cycle, showing how we change from before birth to death.

If thoughts of aging and death are getting you down, though, let me direct you to what I’m calling the Hallway of Hope — a series of pictures of people in their 90s and 100s with suggestions on how you can live a longer, more active life.

Body Worlds makes you think about your body, your life and your choices, probably more than you ever have before.

“Questions about life and death, who we are and what we are made of, are questions most profound to us,” Whalley said.

Photos: Corey Inscoe

This story was originally published November 19, 2015 at 10:00 PM with the headline "Discovery Place’s Body Worlds exhibit will make you think about your body, your life and your choices."