An Upper Hutt man has been charged with stealing two human toes from the Body Worlds Vital exhibit that has travelled the globe displaying preserved human bodies.
The 28-year-old man, who has interim name suppression, appeared in Auckland District Court today where he was charged with stealing the macabre souvenirs from the Auckland exhibition on May 4.
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Each toe is reportedly valued at $5500, according to court documents.
The man was also charged with improperly interfering with the dead body of an unknown person. He pled guilty to both charges, was granted bail and will reappear in the Wellington District Court later this year.
The international body exhibition featuring 150 specimens arrived in New Zealand for the first time in April, and has been visited by 45 million people worldwide.
German doctors Gunther von Hagens and his wife Angelina Whalley are the innovators behind Body Worlds which gained controversy for including the plastinated bodies of a pregnant woman, deformed fetuses, and people having sex.
In an interview with Motherboard, von Hagens said that the plastination process has revolutionized medical knowledge and visually unearthed the complexities of the human body.
“It has become accepted in society, the cultural battle is mostly over, but the fascination is very much the same”, he told Motherboard.
Von Hagens invented the process of plastination in 1977, where a human body is skinned and bodily fluids and fats are replaced with silicone and other polyurethane polymers, a process that can take 1500 hours.
Since establishing the exhibition in 1997, more than 17,000 people have donated their bodies to von Hagens’ Institute for Plastination.
“They want to do something useful with their bodies, after they’re deceased, instead of being eaten by the worms.” Von Hagens told Motherboad.
The skinless corpses have also been used by medical institutions around the world to study how diseases affect the human body.
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