Von Hagen's slice of life

The chance to be at the first public autopsy to be held in Britain for 170 years was too great to resist. Held in the East End of London, the procedure was performed by a team led by Professor Gunther von Hagens, famed for his popular and controversial Body Worlds exhibition. The donor – a 72-year-old German chain-smoking alcoholic – had pledged his body to Von Hagens's Institute for Plastination.

I had an excuse. I had recently written a book about Dr James Barry, the 19th-century surgeon and anatomist. Barry's life and work illustrated that the study of the deceased body is a transfer of information from the dead to the living. It is only human to be interested in the body – so why this fuss over an encounter with death usually available only to medical students and practitioners? According to the Government and the medical establishment, we, the impressionable, excitable public, should not be allowed to see a procedure that under British law can be ordered on us or our loved ones without prior consent.

The definition of autopsy is to see for oneself. Von Hagens offered an opportunity to do just that. The £12 ticket price subsidised a public event with private money – as opposed to a private event that daily takes place at public expense behind closed doors. Objections that Von Hagens degrades death by profiting from it are disingenuous. Unlike many government institutions, he is transparent about how he spends his money. Plastination is expensive (about £22,000 per body), and he needs a minimum of £20m to fund a permanent Museum of Man, designed to bring practical knowledge about the body to the general public.

Looking around the gallery I saw faces deep in concentration, attentively following the process. They were illuminated with internal reflection. Keen to ask questions – and encouraged to do so – these were the animated expressions of people learning something, challenged by the unexpected.

This event gave us an insight into the process of being human, an opportunity not normally experienced in our sanitised culture. The shock-horror expressions shown on television were the prurience of the camera. In truth, only a handful of people showed any aversion. I can report that the British public have strong stomachs.

The medical establishment is divided over the event. Von Hagens's detractors claim that he is providing entertainment rather than education. They should remember where they came from. Modern medicine was pioneered by bone breakers, body snatchers, showmen and scientific mavericks of breathtaking audacity. The antics and showmanship of great British surgical innovators such as Sir Astley Cooper and the Hunter brothers would leave Von Hagens's enterprise looking like your mild-mannered uncle carving the Sunday roast. His originality lies only in the technology. As any medical student knows, he deploys far less gallows humour and more veneration for the body than most anatomical demonstrators.

The question of autopsy concerns the living more than the dead. We need more post-mortem examinations so that scientists and doctors can discover more about the human body. Following the organ retention scandals, the Chief Medical Officer recommended "a programme of public education to ensure that there is general understanding of what is involved in the post-mortem process and its value to maintaining standards of patient care and medical science." Von Hagens's dissection makes a valuable contribution to this public education. But this knowledge is under threat. In the wake of Alder Hey, there are now about 300 senior pathology posts vacant in the UK. Without rectification, this will have terrible consequences for our lives and those of our children.

If you don't look, you don't see. Von Hagens's public event has offered us a clearer view of what an autopsy is, and for many of those present removed some of the fear and mystification that surrounds this most necessary of medical treatments. His demand for public access to the body is sensible and provoking. Frankly, when I'm dead I'd much rather find myself in his hands than left alone in a room, without my consent, with one of his supercilious critics. I wouldn't feel safe with their patronising view that I have no right – dead or alive – to know my own body.

Joan Smith is away