Dueling cadaver exhibits to hit Houston this year

There's nothing quite like dueling museum exhibits — especially when they involve dead bodies. And Houstonians will have the chance to see both of them this year: Bodies: The Exhibition, which opens in mid-April at the Museum of Health & Medical Science, and Body Worlds, opening this summer at the Museum of Natural Science. The exhibits showcase preserved, skinned cadavers in various poses: playing chess, running, stretching and even holding their own skins as if they were discarded overcoats.

You might have heard of Body Worlds, which made its debut in 1996 and has drawn controversy around the world. It's the baby of German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who invented the process of plastination, which replaces water and fat in body tissues with a form of silicone that's hardened with gas, light or heat, creating the posed, preserved cadavers featured in the exhibit. Von Hagens is as much showman as mad scientist: In Berlin, he put the cadaver of a pregnant woman, her belly cut open to reveal her fetus, on a city bus to promote the exhibit. In London, he set the corpses up in Planet Hollywood and performed an autopsy in front of a paying audience at an art gallery. Though von Hagens has toned his advertising down, the stunts (and ethical debates that have raged in most cities where the exhibit has traveled) paid off: Body Worlds has attracted more than 17 million visitors so far, including a million in Los Angeles last year.

That success led von Hagens' former manager, Sui Hongjin, to create the spinoff Bodies. Now the companies the manage the exhibits are suing each other — von Hagens' company claims Hongjin's infringed on his copyright, and Hongjin's claims von Hagens's has spread false rumors about how Hongjin acquired his bodies. Lawsuits aside, can you imagine these guys trying to explain their jobs to people at a cocktail party?

In Houston, the Museum of Natural Science will bank on Body Worlds to be a huge success, while the relatively new Museum of Health and Medical Science hopes the cadavers will be the museum's first blockbuster. Houstonist is excited to catch both exhibits (and to catch the morally upright citizens who have sneaked in when they thought their friends weren't looking).