Abstract
The essay focuses on the phenomenon of health exhibitions that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century and exploded between 1910 and 1940, with a peak in the 1930s. Leading this trend was the experience of the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, established in Dresden in 1912. It was relevant for pedagogical practice and for the novelty of the installations, later exported to the rest of Europe and above all to the United States. The exhibit symbolizing the Dresden Museum was the Transparent Man, a translucent life-size statue-model, made in plastic materials by Franz Tschakert, and exhibited for the first time at the opening of the second International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in 1930. It was displayed in the new building of the Museum that was opened on the occasion. This attractive and interactive medium was built for exhibition and educational purposes and it was soon followed by the Transparent Woman. The Transparent Man became ambassador of German health education all round the world. The transfer and migration of this popular reproducible science display from one country to another with largely different political connotations, allows to trace the diffusion dynamics of a specific cultural trait regarding the human body and its management. After the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 and during the 1930s, the Transparent Man spread in the U.S. through traveling exhibitions, science museums and world’s fairs. The Transparent Man survived the falling of the National-Socialist ideology and gradually became an historical artifact.
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Notes
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Presented for the first time in Japan in 1995, the exhibition by von Hagens shows perfectly preserved human organs and whole bodies in various poses, while they run, swim or ride a bike, or as imitations of famous works of art. The corpses are obtained by means of the technique of plastination invented by von Hagens. The initiative has on the one side given rise to controversy due to the ethicalness of the enterprise, and on the other it has met with enormous financial and public success. Von Hagens speaks about his exhibition in didactical and educational terms, in the name of a traditional healthy lifestyle, showing for example a smoker’s battered lung to praise a healthy life. In reality, this merges with the ancient anatomical and artistic tradition, recovering an old style disturbing medical-anatomical imagination and using the morbid allure of dead bodies which come to substitute wax models, anatomical drawings, and organs in formalin. The bibliography on von Hagens is plentiful. For a general introduction see Goeller (2007) and Hirschauer (2006).
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Connection: Chapter 10 reflects, with some examples related to design, on cultural traits that are typical of stylistic periods, and on their collective and conscious/unconscious nature. Chapter 14 includes an analysis of how generational cultures are influenced by the many socio-economical conditions in which its members grow up. Chapter 3 argues for the importance of particular elements for the construction of national and ethnic identities.
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Connection: Chapter 5 examines, through a ‘cultural traits’ perspective, the pervasiveness of education and the deep cultural links between education and society, focusing on some present-day examples.
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Canadelli, E. (2016). The Diffusion of a Museum Exhibit: The Case of the Transparent Man. In: Panebianco, F., Serrelli, E. (eds) Understanding Cultural Traits. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_4
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