More on plastination

I've wanted to write the following for the past week, but I haven't made the necessary time for myself before now, so here it goes.

On our way to Fæde last Tuesday, i expressed to Jarmila my doubts about those museums where they show plastinated or otherwise conserved bodies to the general public. I wrote about those places in this blog the day before we took the trip, in fact: my concern is the motivation with which people look at these bodies.

Because we're all so trained to take agreeing/disagreeing positions when we talk, and because I didn't express my ideas well enough, Jarmila was quite rough in trashing my objections... Which again were not objections, but doubts.

She said that our attitudes towards our bodies should be much more open than they are, that we shouldn't view our bodies and bodily fluids and functions as dirty or disgusting. Her argument was that such museums would get people to become more familiar with the naturalness of their own biology, and i said maybe she was right.

But later i realized that "maybe" was a big one, as i wasn't sure at all. Jarmila is right about the attitude we have towards our bodies, but it is precisely because we have such attitudes that these places inspire in us such morbid fascination. It is because the creators of these museums also share the same cultural traits that these places are arranged to emphasize anomalies, like in the Mütter museum, or ignoring the dignity and humanities of the identities those bodies held while they were alive.
They are not geared in the right way; they are not the learning institutions Jarmila proposes.

Anyways, the most fascinating part of the discussion were her opinions on disease. She is a very knowledgeable biologist!

Her case was that small populations, with plenty of resources and nature available, do not get sick. She explained to me that the bacteria present in faeces and in rotting or decaying bodies are not harmful to living tissue per se. Viri and harmful bacteria appeared only when there was some imbalance, and such where usually caused when populations got out of sync with their environment. Her contention is that our present medical views, as well as those of our civilization in general, are more oriented towards finding solutions to the effects of the imbalances, rather than to stopping the imbalances themselves.

I can see all this. So what do we do? What do i do?