Show us your corpse: The Body Worlds Circus

"This process of subtraction that's taken away all the social markers in a sense idealizes and universalizes these individuals so that symbolically they come to stand for the undifferentiated human, which allows us to look with impunity because we're not really looking at a person or an individual," she said. "Von Hagens' plastinates could never be displayed with their skins on."

Desmond's views are echoed in the comments left in the The Amazing Bodies Exhibition visitor book during the Melbourne season which ended in February 2011; "I feel like eating a beef jerky and having a cigarette!" to "we are all meat puppets".

Indeed, a coronial section of a human specimen, preserved with the resin plastination technique and then sliced into 3 millimeter pieces and cut horizontally from shoulder to shoulder, reminds me that we look like rashes of bacon when cut up so finely.

In another exhibit, there are pieces of muscle and flesh displayed like chops lined up in a butcher's shop. I heard one viewer mutter "I'm not eating steak again," as he viewed the sliced whole body specimen spread out like choice cuts on a grotesque banquet table.

Having visited the University of Melbourne's anatomy museum, I note there is a vast difference between seeing bits of bodies in preserving fluid to that a plastinated body. The overwhelming feeling of an hour looking through a university anatomy museum is of unease, of seeing donated bodies of obvious paupers, toothless old women and men, of diseased figures covered in tumors and foetuses with horrific birth defects.

That is how it should be, of course. The sight of a human being dead in front of us should remind us of our vulnerability, and our fragile grip on life.

Von Hagens has other ideas. He is planning to expand the body-parts store and wants to set up a mail-order business; "so people from all over the world who are interested can buy parts of the body with one click of the button." (www.time.com Jun. 4, 2010)