Departures of note

Gunther von Hagens was born in Nazi-occupied Poland in the final months of World War Two and grew up in communist East Germany before fleeing to the West in 1970. He developed the plastination process in the following years, a technique that replaced fluids and fatty tissue in corpses with rubber and polymers to preserve anatomical specimens.

Initially his specimens served as teaching aids at universities and research institutes, but in the late 1990s he began touring his Body Worlds exhibitions globally. More than 58 million people worldwide viewed these displays of dissected human and animal bodies, though religious groups and others frequently objected to his display of human remains.

In 2002 he caused further controversy by performing the first public autopsy in London for 170 years on camera. Colleagues paid tribute to him as a pioneer, researcher, and inventor who made anatomy accessible to the general public, while critics accused him of voyeurism and profiting commercially from death. He suffered from Parkinson's Disease for nearly two decades before dying from a brain haemorrhage at age 81 in Heidelberg, Germany.