Discovery Place brings out the dead

Jamie Decker digs the dead.

She gets along with the ashen. Learns from their lifeless forms. Sees to their every need.

“You know what gets my pulse going? No pulse,” declares Decker, stepping lively these days at Discovery Place as a project specialist on “Body Worlds & The Cycle of Life,” where plastinated cadavers strut their stuff in provocative poses.

“Body Worlds” is a touchstone in her professional life. When the exhibit last came through Charlotte, in 2007, she went to see it and came away inspired to pursue a degree in mortuary science.

Now the anatomy instructor at Central Piedmont Community College is leading seminars for volunteers and staff who will be directing visitors through the six-month exhibit at Discovery Place opening Saturday.

She’s an expert in the art of Plastination, a sort of super-embalming that turns corpses into anatomical models. As a result of her first encounter with “Body Worlds,” Decker wound up working in Germany with the firm that prepares the cadavers for display.

‘Like meeting Elvis’

Decker, 26, grew up in Charlotte. She was always into biology.

As a kid, she worked in her father’s auto body shop in Monroe. “I think it made me interested in what’s below the surface,” she says.

Later she worked for a time as a sous chef, a position that satisfied her interest in dissection, she says.

She went to Greenwood, S.C., for a degree in funeral service from Piedmont Technical College. She was intensely interested in dissection and embalming but wasn’t drawn to the other aspects of the funerary business such as sales, estate planning and counseling.

In July 2011, just before her graduation, she invited herself to an international conference on Plastination at the University of Toledo. There she met Dr. Gunther von Hagens, a rock star on the preserved carcass circuit and the anatomist behind “Body Worlds.”

In 1977, he pioneered the Plastination technique of forcing resins, silicon and epoxy into cells to halt decomposition at the University of Heidelberg.

“It was like meeting Elvis,” says Decker.

Von Hagens was impressed with the young American’s zeal. He invited her to Germany for a three-month internship. She leaped at it.

Present display

More than 100 specimens are on display in the new “Body Worlds” exhibit, which examines issues like health and aging.

Specimens come from people who donated their bodies to the program, says Dr. Angelina Whalley, curator.

A series of fetuses showing prenatal development at the start of the exhibit came from old medical anatomical collections or from parents who donated their stillborn children to the program, she says.

Worldwide, 15,500 people have registered to have their bodies go to “Body Worlds” when they’re done with them, including six from Charlotte, she says.

Whalley says the bodies are displayed in active poses – there is a ballet couple, hockey players and an acrobat – to appear more appealing. People were turned off by early iterations where the cadavers appeared corpse-like.

Wherever “Body Worlds” goes, it attracts huge crowds, she says. More than 40 million people worldwide have seen one of the nine traveling exhibitions.

“Questions about life and death and what we’re made of are profound to us,” she says. “People emerge with a different understanding of themselves.”

Back to the U.S.

After the internship, Decker continued to work with von Hagens, then was offered another dream job, for her at least. She became the anatomy lab supervisor at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk.

There she served as diener, a German word for the caretaker of cadavers. She also oversaw the school’s program for people who wanted to donate their bodies for science.

A small Plastination lab was at the medical school where organs could be preserved. Usually they were body parts with an anomaly for medical students to see, like a heart with a pacemaker installed.

“People ask me why I didn’t go to school to be a doctor,” she says. “It’s because I like people dead.”

Back to Charlotte

She return to Charlotte in August 2014 where it was her husband’s turn – he had landed his dream job with the Charlotte Fire Department as a firefighter.

“I love teaching now that I’m doing it,” says Decker, who is expecting the couple’s first child around Christmas.

She finds that most people are intrigued by the dead because of the strong cultural taboos attached in modern society.

“A hundred years ago, you’d take care of a dead family member yourself,” she says. “Nowadays people – not me, of course – are more scared of the dead than the living. We’re a death-defying community.”

Decker says the new “Body Worlds” exhibit celebrates life, not death.

“It’s not grotesque,” she says. “It shows how beautiful the body is.”

This story was originally published November 19, 2015 at 6:33 PM with the headline "Discovery Place brings out the dead."