Gunther Von Hagens, the Body Worlds Creator, Died at 81 and Will Be Plastinated per His Own Plans
· Thought Catalog
Updated 3 minutes ago, August 7, 2026
Gunther von Hagens, the anatomist who invented plastination and turned donated human cadavers into the posed “Body Worlds” exhibits seen by more than 58 million people, has died.
Gunther Von Hagens spent 30 years turning donated bodies into posed exhibits that millions paid to see. Now his own corpse will get the same treatment, and he planned exactly how.
Von Hagens once floated the idea of being sliced into sections so he could be displayed in several places at once, or posed to greet visitors at the door of one of his shows. His family confirmed his body will be plastinated, and his second wife Angelina Whalley, the physician who curated “Body Worlds” with him, will oversee it.
He died July 24 in Germany, nearly 20 years after a Parkinson’s diagnosis he described as “practising dying.” The disease took the violin he loved, and deep-brain stimulation electrodes were what kept his speech intelligible near the end.
The process he invented takes about 1,500 hours per body: the skin comes off, the corpse is partially dissected to expose organs, muscles and veins, and the fluids are swapped for liquid plastic before it’s set into a pose. The idea came from staring at conventional specimens sealed inside clear plastic blocks and wondering why the plastic wasn’t forced into the tissue itself, so the body could be handled and posed instead of locked away.
He called the results “plastinates” and staged them with a showman’s instinct: bodies playing tennis or poker, a pregnant woman opened to reveal her fetus, a plastinated horse ridden by a man holding both their brains. His “Body Worlds” exhibits have drawn more than 58 million visitors across 42 countries, and over 24,000 people have signed up to donate their bodies for the same fate. One of the plastinates is his childhood best friend, who asked for it while dying of cancer.
He was rarely seen in public without a black fedora, a deliberate nod to the anatomists in Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.” He wore it in 2002 in London when he performed Britain’s first public autopsy in roughly 170 years, in front of a live audience, after officials warned him it violated the Anatomy Act. The hat is also how you spot his cameo in “Casino Royale,” leading a tour past the poker-playing plastinates.
The work drew fire from religious leaders and questions about where the bodies came from. A 2004 report alleged his company had accepted the corpses of executed prisoners in China; he said he couldn’t prove they weren’t executed but believed they weren’t, and his institute says those bodies were cremated and that every body on display comes from a voluntary donor.
Born Gunther Gerhard Liebchen in 1945 in what’s now Skalmierzyce, Poland, he fled the advancing Soviets in a laundry basket days after birth. A hemophiliac childhood spent in hospitals, once with only days to live, pulled him toward medicine; he watched his first human autopsy at 17.
After joining protests against the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring, he tried to flee East Germany, was caught, and spent nearly two years as a political prisoner until West Germany paid his ransom in 1970. He later took his first wife’s surname because he found “Liebchen,” roughly “little darling,” undignified, and developed plastination in the late 1970s at the University of Heidelberg.
“I’ve realized that death is absolutely normal and life is the exception,” he told the Independent in 2003. “So, anatomy has given me the chance to make more of my life.”
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