Gunther von Hagens, the German anatomist who invented plastination and built the Body Worlds exhibitions that put preserved human corpses on global display, has died at 81. [1]

AP's obituary balances the ledger he leaves. The technique that made him famous is now standard in medical education worldwide, while the spectacle — posed plastinates, a televised public autopsy, the "Dr. Death" moniker — kept him controversial for half a century. [1]

The ethics question attaches to consent documentation and display, not to the technique itself. Both available frames let plastination absorb that question: the awe frame forgets provenance, the revulsion frame forgets the classroom. The consent ledger is the live issue neither owns, and the exhibitions outlived their maker long before he died.

His death settles nothing. It resolves no custody question over the specimens, no legal claim, and no question of the exhibition's continuation; the documented state of the donor-consent archive is absent from this record. What happens to the plastinates and the Body Worlds institution now is an estate question, not an obituary one — and no later estate or exhibition statements fall inside this edition's cutoff. The obituary is a career assessment; the consent questions outlive the man. [1]

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London